VALUABLE AND POPULAR WORKS 

BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS VOLUME. 



OUR CHILDREN IN HEA VEN By Wm. H. Hoi- 

COMRE, M.D., author of " The Sexes," etc. i2mo. Tinted paper. 
Extra cloth. $1.75. 

" Its sweet pathos and comfo/ting sym- : " It is written in the most devout spirit, 
pathy at once warm and interest us." — i and will interest even those who reject its 
Albany Journal. | doctrines." — Buffalo Express. 

THE SEXES : Here and Hereafter. By Wm. H. 

Holcombe, M.D., author of "Our Children in Heaven," etc. 
i2mo. Tinted paper Extra cloth. $1.50. 



" Whatever one may think of the doc- 
trines of this book, it would be impossi- 
ble to deny that it breathes a pure and 
elevated spirit, and has many thoughts 



which will commend themselves sympa- 
thetically to the followers of all Chris- 
tian faiths " — The Independent , N. y. 



IN BOTH WORLDS. By Wm. H. Holcombe, M.D., 

author of " Our Children in Heaven," " The Sexes : Here and 
Hereafter," etc. etc. i2mo. Tinted paper. Extra cloth. $1.75. 

" While likely to prove of the deepest I the grosser elements of nature, it is in 
and most thrilling interest to all whose | no sense irreverent." — Boston Evening 
minds are elevated above materiality and j Traveler. 



IPltp ' For sale by all Booksellers, or will be sent by mail, postage 
free, on receipt of price by the Publishers. 

Published by J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., 

715 and J I J Market Street, Philadelphia. 



The Othek Life. 



Afoyjl 



The Other Life. 



BY 



WM. H. HOLCOMBE, M.D., 

Author of "Obr Children in Heaven," "The Sexes Here and Here- 
after," li In Both Worlds," etc. etc. 





PHILADELPHIA 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

1871. 



cy 



\V 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., 
In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



'^'N*'^./'*^-*.. ..'*».'**., 



Lippincott's Peess, 
Philadelphia. 



TO 

THE MINISTERS 

OF 

THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST, 

WHO PREACH TO THEIR CONGREGATIONS 
"the life everlasting," 

THIS LITTLE VOLUME 

is 

AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF THE OTHER LIFE ? 

PAGE 

What the skeptic says. What the Christian says. The 
error of both. The critical spirit. Its uses. Skepti- 
cism the secret friend of religion. How. Reasonable 
demand of skeptics and doubting Christians. New light 
necessary ; new light coming. How it ought to come to 
be satisfactory to all. The kind of revelation asked for ; 
the kind granted. Swedenborg. What he claims. Why 
do we believe Euclid? The Christian seer. The bib- 
lical test, the sole test of Swedenborg's credibility 17 

CHAPTER II. 

OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 

Definition of death. Reality opposed to immaterialism. 
The substantial, neither material nor immaterial. The 
Human Form. The universality of man. Why do 
children grow in heaven ? Angels were once men and 
women. Coexistence of two bodies. Our dual life. 
Opening of the Spiritual Senses. Beautiful or ugly 

7 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

hereafter. How we know our friends hereafter. Meta- 
morphoses of the Spiritual Body. Sorrowful indigna- 
tion of the angels at the ignorance of men 38 



CHAPTEE III. 

OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 

Sensation — Touch. Spiritual forms and media corre- 
sponding to the natural forms and media. The Spirit- 
ual Sun and the natural sun. Why our sun will never 
become exhausted of its heat and light. Heat and light 
in the spiritual world. Wonderful things about them. 
The atmospheres of heaven. Lights and their spiritual 
meaning. Spiritual blindness. Spiritual ears; spiritual 
deafness. Music in heaven. Tones of the voice. Taste. 
Smell. What is the resurrection? Pain, mesmeric 
phenomena, etc , 58 



CHAPTEE IV. 

OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 

Communication of ideas. Pantomime. Speech. What 
language do spirits use? Spiritual words. Spiritual 
names. How do angels in different heavens inter- 
change ideas ? How does. God speak to man ? Origin 
of poetry and rhyme. Harmony of thought in heaven. 
One speaks for all. Writing in heaven. Visual repre- 
sentatives. The Apocalypse. Ideas made visible in 
the mesmeric state. Books and libraries in heaven 80 



CONTENTS. 9 

CHAPTER V. 

OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 

PAGE 

The subjective must for ever have its objective manifesta- 
tion. Correspondence between internal and external — 
between state and place. Heaven is real and substantial. 
Sensation of a new-comer. How is heaven created ? 
Difference between physical and spiritual externeity. 
Each spirit creates its own surroundings. Clothing in 
heaven. Houses in heaven. Cities there. What asso- 
ciates ; what disjoins. Societies. Spiritual thought 
and natural thought 104 



CHAPTER VI. 

SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 

Swedenborg's metaphysics no bugbear. Mental measures 
of time and space. No fixed times or spaces in the 
spiritual world. Appearances and their meaning. How 
are times and spaces created? What is the horizon? 
Two fundamental spiritual laws. Did Joshua make the 
sun stand still ? The impassable gulf between Abraham, 
and Dives. Traveling in the spiritual world. How 
did Swedenborg see into the planets? The spiritual 
sun never rises nor sets; but it appears and dis- 
appears. Morning, noon and evening in heaven. No 
night. Sleep and dreams. Alternation of states and its 

origin 127 

A* 



10 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE PRESENCE OP THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 

PAGE 

Shall we see God? Heaven in the soul. The Lord in 
the angels is the life of heaven. The divine sphere. 
Heaven symbolizes the Lord. The Lord is the Sun of 
heaven. The Lord is a Divine Man — hence He may be 
visible. God never appears to man or angel as He 
really is. How does He appear ? " The Angel of Je- 
hovah." The three men who visited Abraham. The 
two angels who saved Lot. Did God manifest Himself 
to Swedenborg? Christ seen and recognized as the 
Supreme God by those who had known Him on earth. 
The Lord present in the Word in heaven. How is the 
Word divine? The unfolding of its spiritual sense 
equivalent to a second coming of the Lord 147 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 

Dr. Chalmers' repudiation of an immaterial heaven. Swe- 
denborg's substantial heaven. What is the materiel of 
heaven? How is it organized? Spiritual Anatomy or 
the transcendental philosophy of Form. Occupations 
not material and not immaterial nor purely mental, but 
spiritual and substantial. Love the all of religion or 
the heavenly life. Social, civil and domestic affairs in 
heaven. Ministering spirits and their labors. Unitary 
and composite perfection 174 



CONTENTS. 11 

CHAPTER IX. 

HELL : ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 

PAGE 

The antipode of heaven. Common errors respecting it. 
How is hell created ? Its materiel. Its life is self-love, 
and hatred to the neighbor. Hell-fire. The darkness 
of hell. What kind of bodies have evil spirits? What 
abodes ? What surroundings ? Are they punished for 
the sins done in the body ? Do they feel remorse ? The 
Devil — what of his personality ? How are evil spirits 
occupied ? Reception of a new-comer in hell. Suffer- 
ings. Why does God permit? Why does He not 
reform the devils? or annihilate them? Is hell to be 
eternal? The uses of hell 197 



CHAPTER X. 

THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 

The intermediate state. Hades. Why the Reformers 
expunged it from their creed. Necessary in the nature 
of things. How created. Its first external appearance 
to the new-comer. The causes of the wonderful changes 
there. Judgment — special and general. How is the 
special judgment effected ? Uses of the world of spirits. 
Societies there. Spiritual affinities. General judg- 
ments. Peter's strange interpretation of a passage 
from the prophet Joel. Four judgments have taken 
place. Christ the Judge ; angels the ministers. New 
keys to the philosophy of history. Effects of the judg- 
ment executed bv the Lord when He was on the earth. 



12 CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



Last judgment in 1757. Its effects on modern civiliza- 
tion. Transitional chaos. The new creation 233 



CHAPTEE XI. 

WHY ARE THESE THINGS NOT BELIEVED ? 

Thought flows only from love. We believe what we love 
and love what we believe. What affections prevent or 
obscure the perception of divine truth ? Out of the 
Church, sensualism and self-culture. In the Church, 
love of its doctrines from religious hopes or fears; love 
of the Church and its sphere as an external organiza- 
tion. What superior and purer affections are to intro- 
duce the New Church truths into the minds of men as 
articles of faith ? The love of truth for its own sake ; 
the aesthetic perception of beauty ; the love of goodness 
as synonymous with the love of use. The inevitable.... 263 



PREFACE. 



These are not the speculations of fancy invading 
the sanctuaries of the soul ; nor the wandering dreams 
of imagination mistaking the beautiful for the true. 
They are veritable pictures of the life to come. To 
the mind that can appreciate their truth they are 
more valuable than any philosophical or scientific dis- 
coveries. They give a light to the intellect and a joy 
to the heart unknown to previous Dispensations., It 
is needless for me. to disclaim any right of posses- 
sion in these sublime revelations. They have been 
drawn from the pages of Emanuel Swedenborg, the 
divinely commissioned Interpreter of the Word of 
God. 

For that reason they have nothing in common with 

the doctrines so widely disseminated under the name 

of Spiritualism. 

2 • 13 



14 PREFACE. 

Many Christians reject instantaneously the idea 
that man, while living upon this earth, can receive 
any revelation of the other life. 

They quote from Paul to the Corinthians : 

"Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have 
entered into the heart of man, the things which God 
hath prepared for them that love him — " 

Let them finish the verse, and reflect on its mean- 
ing : — " But God hath revealed them to us by his 
Spirit." 

Rev. F. W. Robertson, one of the most eminent of 
modern thinkers, says of this text : 

" In the quotation of this verse a false impression 
is often evident. It is quoted as if the apostle by 
' the things prepared ' meant heaven, and the glories 
of a world which is to be visible hereafter, but is at 
present unseen. This is manifestly alien from his 
purpose. The world of which he speaks is not a 
future but a present revelation. God hath revealed it. 
He speaks not of something to be manifested here- 
after, but of something already shoivn, only not to the 
eye or the ear." 

A fearful sentence from the Bible is sometimes 
cited with the expectation of instantly silencing 



PREFACE. 15 

any one who thinks he may tell us something of the 
world in which we are to live for ever : 

" If any man shall add unto these things, God shall 
add unto him the plagues that are written in this 
book." 

Examine the verse closely, and you will discover 
that this curse is pronounced against those who pre-, 
sume to add anything to "the prophecies" contained in 
the Book of Revelation, a book written by John, and 
not recognized as a sacred book nor bound up with 
the other Scriptures until hundreds of years after. 
This verse, therefore, could have no reference to the 
Bible as a whole, for the biblical canon had not been 
decided at the time the verse was written. 

A man might describe heaven and hell truly and 
most minutely without adding an iota to the Bible ; 
for the Bible is a revelation, not of heaven and hell, 
but of the Divine Law 

Nor is the unfolding of the spiritual sense of the 
Bible any addition to it. It is simply a bringing to 
view of what was already there, and not heretofore 
discovered. As well might we say that he who re- 
veals the laws of the human mind, adds something to 
the anatomy of the human body. 



16 PREFACE. 

These are examples of the unfair arguments fre- 
quently adduced against the claims of Swedenborg. 
Let the candid and truth-loving Christian refuse 
longer to be blinded by such sophistries. 

It is not, however, merely to gratify an excusable 
curiosity, that I endeavor to popularize the teachings 
of Swedenborg about the other life. It is because 
they are so intensely practical, so transcendently val- 
uable in the conduct of this life, in the illumination 
of the intellect, and as a stimulus and guide in the 
great work of individual regeneration. They contain 
moreover the elements of a philosophy which will 
remove the objections of the skeptic, dissipate the 
doubts of the Christian, and, overcoming all obsta- 
cles, finally unitize the Church of God. 

W. H. H. 

New Orleans, Sept. 1870. 



The Other Life. 



CHAPTER I. 

HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF THE OTHER 

LIFE ? 

THE other life? 
The skeptic looks into the grave of his friend 
and scornfully mutters : 

"There is no other life. Who has returned from 
the dead and told us of it ? If there be a God, 
why has He not revealed it so fully that all may 
be satisfied, and so plainly that no man can mis- 
take his meaning? 

' The grave's mouth laughs into derision 
Desire and dread and dream and vision, 
Delight of heaven and sorrow of hell.' " 

The Christian clasps his beloved Bible to his 
heart and meekly exclaims : 

" This is my pledge of immortality. Keeping 

2* 17 



18 THE OTHER LIFE. 

these divine laws, I am assured of eternal life. 
What form I may have, where I may be, what I 
shall do, what laws and phenomena exist in the 
other world, I do not know, nor is it essential that 
I should inquire." 

And so men pass from a temporal to an eter- 
nal state of being in a strange apathy respect- 
ing subjects of supreme value, as ignorant of the 
future that awaits them as the unborn babe is of 
the world into which he will be ushered. 

Is this right? Is it necessary? Is it inevitable? 

The skeptical philosopher affirms that there are 
positive limitations to human thought; that no 
possible scientific development or research can ever 
lead us to a knowledge of the soul and its destinies; 
that the existence of a spiritual world is a mere 
hypothesis, and all theology the offspring of dreamy 
abstraction and idle speculation. 

The Christian concedes the finiteness and feeble- 
ness of the human understanding, and correctly 
infers from it the necessity of revelation. He ac- 
cepts the Word of God as the revelation of a moral 
law. Assured of a blessed immortality, he asks 
for no special unfolding of the life to come. In- 
deed he persuades himself that God has intention- 
ally and wisely kept us in ignorance of the laws 



HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF IT? 19 

and phenomena of the spiritual world : and that it 
is best for us to know little and think little of 
what seems to be concealed, and forbidden ground. 

Is not this a hasty conclusion, an unfounded 
assumption, a fatal mistake? Would not a clear 
knowledge of the soul and its future surroundings 
throw an invaluable light upon the mysteries and 
conduct of this life ? Is not this world, indeed, an 
insoluble enigma only because its connection with 
the spiritual world is not explained? How 
thoughtless to suppose that God designedly con- 
ceals from us the knowledge we most require ! 
Our grossness, our sensuality, our worldliness, our 
moral obliquity, our spiritual blindness shut hea- 
ven and the angels from us. The revelations given 
to us are 'necessarily adapted to our own states. 
God ever bends lovingly down toward us, ready to 
flood our spirits with light. The solution of our 
darkness is simply this : the Church and the world 
have hitherto not been prepared to.receive a reve- 
lation of the life to come, which must necessarily 
embody a new and sublime philosophy of mind 
and matter. 

Are they now prepared ? Are they at least pre- 
paring ? 

Many good Christians, full of faith and zeal, 



20 THE OTHER LIFE. 

loving the Word of God sincerely, and experiencing 
in their own hearts the spiritual blessings it prom- 
ises, live in a state of serene indifference amounting 
almost to torpor. Thinking, as we may say, from 
the affections rather than from the intellect, they 
pass their lives in a delicious day-dream of the suf- 
ficiency and infallibility of the Christian theology. 
They are ignorant or unconscious of the storms 
that are raging without and within the Church. 
They see no decay of its strength, no eclipse of its 
faith, no disintegration of its elements. They 
have never had the critical and rational spirit 
awakened in their minds, so as to discover the 
insecurity of their ground and the difficulties of 
their position. 

The critical spirit, which is the rectifying or ver- 
ifying power of the mind, arises spontaneously in 
the natural evolution of the human intellect. One 
of its earliest manifestations in Europe was the 
great Protestant battle for the right of private 
judgment. It has been the means of the emanci- 
pation of thought from the subtleties of meta- 
physics and the despotism of theology, which had 
their rise in the infancy and childhood of society. 
The reaction of the critical spirit against the 
conservative and dogmatic elements which are 



HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF ITt 21 

grounded in conventionalisms, is undoubtedly 
the cause of all the progress and liberty we have 
achieved in these modern times. 

The weapon of the critical spirit is analysis. It 
dissects, searches, scrutinizes all things, and sub- 
jects every element to the test of reason and to the 
processes of inexorable science. It dissipates error, 
exposes fallacy and pretension, and separates the 
true from the false. It has no creed but truth, ob- 
tained by the study of facts and the universal 
organic laws which connect them together. Repu- 
diating tradition and authority, it renders allegiance 
only to experiment, observation and reason. 

This free spirit of inquiry has been turned with 
special earnestness to the analysis of the Bible and 
its claims to supernatural origin. Its decisions 
have been steadily adverse to those claims; and 
this is the true cause of modern infidelity with its 
innumerable phases, from the open atheist who 
scoffs at mystery and miracle, to the sincere 
thinker in the pulpit, who is secretly troubled in 
spirit at the doubts he cannot control and the 
questions he cannot answer. 

The exercise of the critical spirit in the Church 
itself, has thrown its elements into a fearful state of 
ferment and dissension. The difficulty has been 



22 THE OTHER LIFE. 

twofold : to reconcile the literal interpretation of 
the Bible with the increasing demands of reason 
and science ; and to exonerate dogmatic theology 
from the charges of inconsistency, fundamental 
error and sheer incomprehensibility. The conserv- 
ative element struggles earnestly to preserve the 
old landmarks. The radical element, outweighing 
it in intellect if not in numbers, would readjust the 
formulas of faith in correspondence with the rea- 
sonable demands of the critical philosophy. So 
the Church presents the singular spectacle of a vast 
body of men held compactly together by faith in 
God and the moral law, but repelled from each 
other by different and irreconcilable opinions. 

How long is this to last? Where is it to end? 
Has the Church, ivith its present resources, the 
means of defence and recuperation, the power of 
harmonizing the discordant element within, and 
of converting the skeptical element without ? Un- 
questionably not. Unless additional light from 
heaven is granted for its moral and intellectual 
renovation, its gradual disintegration and decay are 
inevitable, and it will fall a prey to time and the 
contending elements. 

He, however, who has studied wisely the move- 



HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF IT? 23 

merits of Providence, will have no fear that the 
Church of God will perish or his Word fail. 

Skepticism, growing up amid a general stimulus 
and collision of thought, is not the formidable en- 
emy of the Christian religion that it seems to be. 
It is in reality a friend in disguise. It exists by 
divine permission and is overruled by Divine 
Providence for his own ends. In barbaric and 
half-civilized countries, where superstition and 
despotism reign, there are no skeptics. The unde- 
veloped reason lies impotent at the feet of a childish 
imagination. Skepticism is a necessary and salu- 
tary phase in the ordinary evolution of the mind. 
By detecting and exposing error it prepares the 
way for the advent of truth. It is aggressive and 
destructive, but it is transitional. As evil spirits 
are permitted to tempt us, to stir up our wicked 
lusts and thus reveal us to ourselves, so skepticism 
comes to agitate our minds, disturb our false peace, 
and discover the nature and extent of our intellect- 
ual darkness. 

For, if the Christian religion as now promul- 
gated were a perfect and coherent system of truth, 
there could be no skepticism, for it would have ful- 
filled its mission. If the Church met promptly 
and fairly all the rational objections which have 



24 THE OTHER LIFE. 

been propounded, if it satisfied the cold and critical 
reason as well as it does the glowing religious in- 
stincts of the heart, it would have no opponents 
but those insincere spirits whose infidelity is, really 
based on their moral alienation from God. 

The critical spirit, legitimately exercised within 
the Church itself, detects and exposes every point 
of a weak, false or corrupt presentation of divine 
truth. It is a rough surgeon probing severely the 
deep wounds and discovering the unsound parts. 
It excites of course the antipathy, indignation or 
pity of the apathetic Christian, who would enjoy 
his religion in peace, and shut his eyes to the inde- 
fensible points of his belief. 

The critical spirit, like the trumpet of an angel, 
will wake this unthinking religionist from his 
dream of perfection ; will stimulate his reflective 
powers, sharpen his faculties, excite his doubts and 
arouse his fears. He will discover that the pre- 
vailing literal interpretation of many parts of the 
Bible is untenable, and that the fantastic dogmas 
erected upon it are unsatisfactory and incredible; 
and he will grope in every direction for that better 
light which is coming. 

Powerful and aggressive as skepticism undoubt- 
edly is, its mission is drawing to a close — a fact of 



HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF IT? 25 

which the skeptics themselves are wholly uncon- 
scious. We see the beginning of the end. The 
means are already being prepared by which the 
whole human mind, including all its most conserv- 
ative and radical elements, shall be lifted into 
higher and purer light. Difficulties will be re- 
moved, obscurities explained, reconciliations ef- 
fected, the skeptic silenced, and the Christian 
enlightened, when revelation is seen as a perfected 
whole, and not viewed in part. Divine truth shall 
burst forth with new glory from the spiritual sense 
of the Holy Word, and the prophecy will be ful- 
filled : 

"And in those days the light of the moon shall 
be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun 
shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." 

How is the skeptic to be delivered from his un- 
belief and brought back to the christian anchorage? 
How is the doubting Christian to be re-established 
and strengthened and comforted ? By the com- 
bined prayers and faith and reasonings and persua- 
sions of the Church as now constituted ? No ! 
By some spontaneous development of the human 
mind, so that it shall penetrate unaided into spirit- 
ual an3 divine mysteries as it has never been able 
to do before ? By no means. 

3 B 



26 THE OTHER LIFE. 

God has seen from his high heavens that the 
Church has executed his commission according to 
the light He gave it, which was only that of the 
letter of the Word. He has seen that the human 
mind in its orderly evolution has arrived at that 
stage when it bursts the bonds of literal or sensu- 
ous interpretation ; — a further adhesion to the literal 
dogmas would be retrograde and destructive. The 
Church has unconsciously outgrown the old methods 
of interpretation which were necessary in its infancy 
and childhood ; and the inevitable warfare between 
the spirit and the letter is the cause of all its doubts 
and difficulties and dissensions. 

He has come to its rescue. He has come to 
enlighten, to revive, to bless, to purify it. 

God has seen also the revolt of the human intel- 
lect against the absurd pretensions of tradition and 
authority ; against spiritual bondage and priest- 
craft; against blind adhesion to literal interpreta- 
tions which are wholly indefensible ; and against 
the general inconsistency and unprogressiveness of 
the Church. He has heard the cry of his erring 
children for light. The time has come when He 
will satisfy their longings for truth, answer their 
hardest questions, grant their reasonable petitions, 
and remove all difficulties from the way of a per- 



HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF ITf 27 

feet understanding between the Creator and his 
creatures. 

How is all this to be effected ? By light from 
heaven. By a new revelation. By the opening 
of the seals which have hidden from our eyes the 
spiritual sense of the Word of God. In that sense 
alone lies the illuminating and unitizing power of 
the Scriptures. It is the inner garment of our 
Lord, which was of one piece woven without 
seam from top to bottom. The literal sense is 
"the clouds of heaven" which conceal from us the 
pure light of the sun. God is coming down in 
those clouds and will make them transparent with 
the glory of the spiritual sense. 

When, where ? and how is this to be accom- 
plished ? 

If the honest and earnest dissenting element in 
and out of the Church — that element which hun- 
gers and thirsts after the truth, and refuses to 
recognize the so-called orthodoxy as truth ; if that 
element could be concentrated and questioned as to 
its real sentiments, wants and needs, and could 
make a definite reply, we may imagine that it 
would be somewhat in the following strain : 

" We ask a new and more satisfactory revelation 
from heaven. It is the one great, urgent, mighty 



28 THE OTHER LIFE. 

need of the human soul. The revelation by a 
written Word, as it now stands, is incomplete. A 
revelation couched in prophetic mysteries and 
"dark sayings" is assuredly not a finality. We 
want that additional element which shall establish 
its unity, prove its truth and reveal its interior 
beauty and glory — which shall make it a living 
and perfect whole, uniting heaven and earth. 

" If there ever was any revelation, any special 
insight into the spiritual world, any vision of an- 
gels, any communication with the dead, any mani- 
festation of the Divine Presence, such things are 
again possible ; for they never could have occurred 
by the violent disruption of organic natural laws, 
but through the operation of some higher laws of 
which we are ignorant. The potentiality of these 
conditions must inhere in the mental constitution 
of man himself. Their recurrence under provi- 
dence must be determined by the historical evolu- 
tion of the Church. 

"We do not ask any addition to the biblical 
record : any new chapter or book appended to the 
Bible. However strongly substantiated by mira- 
cles and confirmed by witnesses, that book might 
be as obscure and unsatisfactory to future genera- 
tions as Nahum or the Apocalypse is to us. 



SOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF IT? 29 

We do not ask for more miracles and mysteries, 
but for rational light on those already recorded. 
We will believe truth when we se'e it, without mir- 
acles ; and no miracles can impose the unintelligi- 
ble and contradictory on our minds as truth. Not 
a new Bible, but a divinely-authorized interpretation 
of the old one, is the grand theological desideratum 
of modern times. 

" We do not ask for dead men to come out of their 
graves and tell us what they saw and heard in the 
other world. We do not ask for spirits to come 
and take possession of our minds and bodies and 
write and speak through us as mediums. Nor for 
holy men to have visions and ecstasies in which the 
life to come is revealed to them. These modes of 
instruction belong to the past. They are apt to be 
the sources of innumerable fallacies. At the best 
they are imperfect and unsatisfactory. They are 
not adapted to the present scientific and realistic 
stage of human development. Revelations must 
change their character according to the varying 
states and progressive evolution of the human 
mind. 

" Revelations are only made through men as in- 
struments of God's providence. Some man must 
be raised up for this new and stupendous mission. 



30 THE OTHER LIFE. 

We are not all abashed at the idea that some man 
of our own times shall be prepared by Almighty 
God for experiences and labors more important and 
valuable in some respects than those of Moses or 
John. It is indeed the very thing needed and best 
calculated to restore to Moses and John the hold 
they are fast losing upon the faith of mankind. 
The credibility of the Christian religion depends 
largely, we think, on the universality and eternity 
of the laws and principles upon which it was 
founded. What was possible and probable two 
thousand or four thousand years ago, under similar 
conditions is possible and probable now. If human 
instruments for the divine work of revelation were 
necessary and available then, they may become so 
now. 

" We cannot believe that Moses, Ezekiel or John 
had visions of angels and received truth from 
heaven, unless we admit that it would be possible 
for a person in our own age to have similar visions 
and receive still higher truths. We cannot believe 
that Paul was carried into the third heaven while 
still living in the body, without conceding the pos- 
sibility, at least, that some modern Paul might, foi 
the sake of great use to the Church, undergo sim- 
ilar and even far greater experiences. Those won- 



HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF IT? 31 

derful things were done away back in the ages of 
myth and fable. Let them be repeated now, with 
the necessary modifications, beneath the critical 
eyes of philosophy and science. 

(( Let the man to whom this sublime mission shall 
be entrusted, be fully prepared for it by all good 
agencies visible and invisible. Let him be a man 
of great intellectual capacity and of thorough phil- 
osophical and scientific culture. Let his character 
be pure and spotless, and let his catholicity be so 
broad and beautiful that sectarianism would not 
only be abhorrent, but impossible to his nature. 
Let him be superior to all ambitions in Church 
and State, exempt from all selfish and personal con- 
siderations, loving the truth wholly for its own 
sake. Let him be no poet who will see facts 
through the medium of fancy, and no metaphysi- 
cian who will mystify by his abstractions, instead 
of instructing by his statements. Let him be pure- 
hearted, clear-though ted, truthful, practical and 
thoroughly trustworthy. 

" Let Providence prepare such a man for us, and 
in the maturity of all his powers open his spiritual 
sight into that vast spiritual realm which is said to 
lie unseen around us; as he opened the eyes of 
Moses to see the glory of God on the mount ; as 



32 THE OTHER LIFE. 

he opened the eyes of John to see the New Jerusa- 
lem descending from heaven. Let this modern 
Seer become familiar with spirits and angels. Let 
him converse with the good and wise of past ages 
who have gone before us into the land of light. 
Let him study the relations between spirit and 
matter ; the laws and phenomena of the other life, 
so far as they may be comprehensible to the human 
understanding. 

" Above all, let him report what angels and spir- 
itual intelligences think of this Book which we call 
the Word of God ; whether it has a divine mean- 
ing which penetrates into heaven or not ; whether 
the angels understand it differently from us ; and 
how they elicit its meanings. Let us be able to 
compare the theology of angels living in the light 
of God with the theology of our discordant sects. 
If there be any spiritual sense to the Bible, let his 
mind be illumined by spiritual light to receive it, 
and to transmit it to the benighted children of 
men. 

" One condition more is essential to the perfection 
of this revelation we solicit. It must not be the 
dream or the vision of a night, or of many nights, 
but the waking business of a life ! Let it last for 
twenty or thirty years. Let there be no hasty and 



HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF IT? 33 

superficial work ; no hallucinations ; no fallacies \ 
no errors. Let this agent of ours, admitted into 
the courts of heaven and studying for us the 
deepest mysteries of the universe, have the am- 
plest opportunity to see and hear; to examine and 
scrutinize; to compare, to test, to verify. Then 
let him make his full report ; his whole soul radi- 
ant with the light of heavenly truth, unbiased 
and untainted by any thought or feeling of worldly 
origin." 

If such were the cry sent up to the Divine Wis- 
dom from the doubting and despairing mind of 
man, who can say that it would be an unreason- 
able or an audacious petition? If the theology 
and psychology embraced between the lids of our 
Bible are true, this modern seership, stupendous as 
it seems at first sight, is not only practicable and 
credible, but inevitable. The sincere Christian 
should hail the thought of it with joy. 

God knows our wants before we ask him. He 
anticipates our prayers. This very thing, which 
the skeptic demands as the crowning proof of rev- 
elation, and which the doubting Christian desires 
to relieve him from his perplexities, has been al- 
ready accomplished ! It was a part of the great 

plan of Divine Providence, foreseen and provided 

B 



34 THE OTHER LIFE. 

from the beginning. Revelation has its succes- 
sive steps and degrees, one unfolding out of and 
founded on another. This last opening of the 
heavens explains, harmonizes, and unitizes all the 
others. Theology and Science are now married, 
and the truths of each are written upon the face of 
the other. " He that hath ears to hear, let him 
hear." 

Emanuel Swedenborg was the instrument chosen 
and prepared by the Lord for this sacred mission. 
He works no miracles to compel belief, but gives us 
spiritual light to illumine the rational understand- 
ing. His own state was the greatest of miracles. 
What is the miracle of raising a dead man to life, 
in comparison with the miracle of keeping a living 
man for nearly thirty years in open communication 
with heaven, hell and the world of spirits? And 
this sublime manifestation of divine power is dis- 
credited, and looked upon as a case of self-magnet- 
ization, hallucination or chronic mental disease ! 

The outside questions of Swedenborg's authority 
and credibility can be answered to the satisfaction of 
any candid mind ; but our final judgment must be 
based upon the intrinsic merit of what he has re- 
vealed. The mere weight of his name and charac- 
ter is little or nothing in the eyes of his readers. 



HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF IT? 35 

The truths lie teaches are, like those of geometry, 
to be seen in their own light and in the relations 
they bear to each other. We do not believe geo- 
metrical theorems on the authority of Euclid, nor 
the laws and phenomena of the spiritual world on 
the authority of Swedenborg. They are true in the 
nature of things ; and when once comprehended by 
the rational faculty, they can never be dislodged 
from the understanding. 

Swedenborg's spiritual sight was not opened 
merely to gratify our curiosity about the future life, 
or even to unfold a new spiritual philosophy. 
Charming and instructive as are his communica- 
tions upon these points, they are only incidental 
to a nobler purpose. His mission was to reveal the 
spiritual sense of the Word of God. That sense 
pre-existed in heaven before the Word was written 
upon earth. It has been for ages concealed in the 
clouds of the letter, and is utterly un discoverable 
by the unaided intelligence of man. It is supreme 
folly to suppose that Swedenborg invented it. 

Swedenborg proves not only the inspiration but 
the divinity of the Scriptures. He reveals to us the 
full meaning of that strange declaration, "and the 
Word was God." From his new and spiritual 
standpoint only can we understand the heavenly 



36 THE OTHER LIFE. 

truths which are involved in the creation of the 
world, the fall of man, the. flood, the story of the 
patriarchs, the bondage in Egypt, the return to Ca- 
naan, the history of the Jews, the dark sayings of 
the prophets, the incarnation and glorification of 
Christ, the end of the world, the last judgment, the 
descent of the new Jerusalem, and the second com- 
ing of the Lord. 

This revelation of the spiritual sense is the 
genuine seal and warrant of his mission. By this 
alone is his claim to the sublimest seership recorded 
in the history of the race, to be tested. If he does 
not draw forth, by some interior illumination, a 
vast, coherent, comprehensive, pre-existing spiritual 
sense from the Word of God, then has he failed to 
substantiate his claims, and we may fairly discredit 
his statements on other matters. But if he has 
done this, if the spiritual sense illumines his pages, 
a further gift from the wisdom of the Divine Mind 
to man, to be seen by the pure in heart, and to be 
understood by the earnest, patient, candid, and 
humble seeker after Divine truth, then is Sweden- 
borg the highest earthly authority on spiritual 
subjects. 

It is because Swedenborg comes to us with the 
Bible in his hand, and proves his claims to our 



HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF IT? 37 

confidence by the spiritual interpretation he gives 
it, that we find it easy to accept his disclosures 
(always rational) about the life after death, about 
heaven, hell, and the world of spirits. And be- 
cause the Spiritualists of the present day offer us a 
philosophy and theology different from those taught 
in the Bible, we can give no more heed to their 
communications than to the whisperings of the idle 
wind. 

How can we know anything of the other life? 
Not from scientific studies, not from theological 
speculations, not from communication with spirits, 
but from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. 

It is from this source, divinely appointed and 
rationally authenticated — from this inexhaustible 
mine of spiritual treasures, and not from any com- 
munication with spirits or from any vain imagina- 
tions of my own, that I have drawn the interesting 
and beautiful things which the reader will find in 
this book. Let him not be dismayed at difficulties. 
The subject must unfold gradually. Each succeed- 
ing chapter will throw some light upon all that has 
gone before. 



CHAPTER II. 

OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 

DEATH is the renunciation of the natural body ; 
nothing more. The soul then lives consciously 
in a spiritual world and in a spiritual body. 

" There is a natural body and there is a spiritual 
body," says Paul. 

Natural and spiritual ! We think of one as being 
something solid and real ; of the other as something 
ethereal, intangible, almost incomprehensible. This 
arises from the darkness of our natural state, and 
the feebleness of our spiritual perceptions. The 
spiritual has every form, quality, and property 
which we attribute to the natural. When death 
liberates us from our prison-house, our conceptions 
will be exactly reversed ; that world will be sub- 
stantial and this a shadow; that life will be the 
waking state and this the dream. 

God has created two substances ; so different that 
they do not connect by continuity — that is, they do 
not pass or run one into the other. One is within 

38 



OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 39 

the other, like a circle within a circle, but they have 
no tangential points. They are wholly distinct or 
discrete. One is physical substance, the other is 
spiritual substance. They can never be transmuted 
into each other. 

Spiritual substances are really alive, and are the 
only causative, sensitive, organizing forces in the 
universe. Physical substance, or matter as we call 
it, is of itself always inert or dead, being merely a 
plastic material moulded into definite forms by in- 
flowing spiritual substances. Thus the natural world 
is caused by and represents or corresponds to the 
spiritual world. So the natural body is caused by 
and represents or corresponds to the spiritual body 
in which the soul is manifested. 

We therefore reverse the creed of the materialist, 
who says that affections and thoughts are the result 
of physical organization, the invisible secretions of 
the brain. On the contrary, the brain w T ith its 
subtile and wonderful forms is simply the result of 
affections and thoughts — the condensation of mate- 
rial particles around a more living brain, which 
pulsates in spiritual atmospheres, and which is the 
true " dome of thought and palace of the soul." 

This spiritual body is not the soul, but an or- 
ganic human form composed of indestructible spir- 



40 THE OTHER LIFE. 

itual substances in which the soul or vital spiritual 
principle lives and is United, differentiated from 
God and from all other souls. 

Death therefore does not solve the riddles of 
metaphysics. Spirits and angels discuss the nature 
and qualities of the soul just as our philosophers 
do on earth. The soul in its essence is incompre- 
hensible. It is known only by its manifestations. 
The rational soul is only manifested under the 
human form. We can never see or understand 
God outside of that visible human form — the Lord 
Jesus Christ. We can never comprehend the spir- 
itual principle or soul outside of some thinking, 
living form in which it resides. 

We need not wonder at this. Thought and per- 
ception occurring in our finite organs, have neces- 
sarily their limitations, their impossibilities. God 
and the soul will for ever be mysteries. They are 
only revealed to us through created forms. We 
know nothing of heat and light but through ob- 
jects which are heated or luminous. We know 
nothing of goodness, truth or beauty, but what we 
learn through those forms or objects which we 
designate as good, true or beautiful. 

Therefore the spiritual world is organic, com- 
posed of parts, objects or substances, arranged into 



OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 41 

series, degrees and systems. It is a genuine world, 
a universe of itself, a cosmos, far more extensive, 
perfect and beautiful than this. It is perceived or 
recognized b} 7 the same senses which we here enjoy, 
only far more delightfully and thoroughly. The 
other life has not only its metaphysics and its the- 
ology, but its physics, its chemistry, its botany, its 
anatomy, its architecture, its art, its government, 
everything, indeed, which can be made a subject 
of intelligent study or of ennobling affection. 

Those who expect to escape the life of the senses 
at death, and to rise disembodied into an ether of 
pure thought, are greatly astonished when they are 
raised from the natural body and find the other life 
a continuation of this. 

How melancholy is it to converse with a pro- 
fessed Christian who has formed no definite idea of 
the bodily shape he is to wear in the better life ! 
Who thinks of his deceased friends as disembodied 
spirits ! formless and unsubstantial shadows ! inces- 
santly engaged in praising God and contemplat- 
ing his divine perfections ! And these dark, cold, 
cheerless abstractions, in the face of the living, beau- 
tiful, substantial revelations of the Scripture, even 
in the letter ! 

Ask this unthinking Christian who is startled 

4 * 



42 THE OTHER LIFE. 

by the assertion that the soul cannot be divested 
by death of the human form — ask him if Christ 
did not ascend to heaven with the human body 
which he exhibited to the doubting apostle? if 
Enoch and Elijah, did not pass bodily into the 
spiritual world? if all the spirits and angels seen 
of the prophets and apostles did not appear in the 
human shape ? if his own idea of the final heaven 
of the saints is not based upon the resurrection and 
purification of his own gross natural body ? 

He will be obliged from his owm standpoint 
(which is not ours) to answer these questions af- 
firmatively; but he will not abide the logical issue. 
With strange inconsistency he charges us with en- 
tertaining a sensuous idea of heaven, when we 
affirm, from the biblical standpoint, that the soul 
has a bodily human form and enjoys all the senses 
and faculties which we here possess. 

Swedenborg alone has taught us the deep philo- 
sophical and moral significance of the Human 
Form. It is the only form capable of expressing 
the spiritual life by freedom of will, rationality of 
thought and the subordination of the sensuous to a 
higher sphere. It is the form of forms, the cen- 
tral, pivotal, archetypal form to which all other 
forms in the universe refer themselves. All the 



OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 43 

forces, powers, substances of the natural and the 
spiritual worlds conspire to produce and to perpet- 
uate the human form. And the cause of this stu- 
pendous fact is, that they are all animated from 
moment to moment by the creative breath of God, 
who is himself a Divine Man. 

The Human Form is, therefore, the universal 
form. God is a Man ; heaven is a Man ; the uni- 
verse is a Man ; society is a Man ; the church is a 
Man ; government is a Man. Men, spirits, and 
angels are units in these composites ; microcosms in 
these macrocosms, as every atom of a crystal is an in- 
finitesimal repetition of the crystal itself. There is 
nothing outside of this human form. All inferior 
forms, animal, vegetable, mineral, are fragments, 
portions, repetitions, prophecies of the grand type. 
Everything in nature points, like the old signs of 
the zodiac, to some part of the human body. 

Every living form, vegetable or animal, advances 
by stages of growth and development to a certain 
typical adult standard, in which it fully manifests its 
life and fulfills its uses. Growth and development 
are different. By development a simple substance 
assumes a more complex form. The contents of the 
egg develop into the chick. Food is developed into 
blood. Blood is developed into nervous fluid. By 



44 THE OTHER LIFE. 

growth an organ or tissue, whatever its rank in the 
scale of development, enlarges in size, density or 
capacity. When development and growth are per- 
fected, the form is said to be adult. The inflowing 
life from God which arranges, adjusts and organ- 
izes atoms as well as worlds, bears everything 
steadily onward to its specific adult type. 

It is for this reason that infants and children 
who are transplanted from earth to paradise, grow 
to be men and women in the spiritual world. The 
natural causes which produce the development and 
growth of the natural body correspond to the spir- 
itual causes which produce the development and 
growth of the spiritual body. It is as impossible 
for infants to remain infants for ever in heaven, as 
it is for them to continue infants indefinitely on 
earth. 

But how does the spiritual body grow? 

The natural body lives by bread ; but the spirit- 
ual body, by the words that proceed out of the 
mouth of God. We cannot live by bread alone or 
by natural food. We require spiritual food for the 
organic spiritual side of our life. Spiritual food is 
affection and thought; or in more comprehensive 
terms, good and truth. The spiritual body grows 
by the reception of affections and thoughts, by the 



OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 45 

appropriation and assimilation of spiritual good and 
truth just as the natural body grows by the diges- 
tion and assimilation of natural food. 

To feed a child in heaven is to instruct it in 
spiritual things, and to inspire it with a heavenly 
affection for the truth communicated. Infants ap- 
pear as infants when they first enter the spiritual 
world, because they cannot feel, think, love and act 
as adults. But their destiny is human, not infan- 
tile. Their organs receptive of divine life must 
grow and develop. By successive appropriations 
of spiritual goods and truths, they attain to the 
form and uses of adult life; and their spiritual 
bodies grow proportionately until they reach the 
typical standard. 

The adult natural body is kept in life and action 
by a continual circle of waste and supply, a con- 
tinual casting off and a continual renewal of its 
elements. So it is with the spiritual body. It is 
wrought by means of spiritual goods and truths. 
It must render back all it receives. Woe to it, if 
in the spirit of selfishness it would keep anything to 
itself. It must exhale, radiate, distribute, impart to 
others all the good and truth it has acquired. It 
receives only on the condition of giving. Its life is 
held on a tenure of perpetual uses, of ceaseless, 



46 THE OTHER LIFE. 

spiritual activities. The delight attending the exe- 
cution of these spiritual functions is the blessedness 
of heaven. 

The spiritual bodies in which we find ourselves 
after death are male or female. Man is man and 
woman is woman, morally, intellectually and or- 
ganically for ever. One cannot live the life or ful- 
fill the functions or be transmuted into the form of 
the other. The anatomical differences flow from the 
spiritual differences; and both are essential, organic 
and eternal. Sex is mental. The sexes were made 
for each other, not only in time but for eternity. It 
is only in heaven that we learn the true nature of 
love. It is only in heaven that marriage is spirit- 
ual, celestial, perpetual, divine. 

There is no reproduction and birth in the spirit- 
ual world. No spiritual bodies are born there ; 
they are created simultaneously with their natural 
bodies, here grow and develop in them and are extri- 
cated from them at death by the process called res- 
urrection. But heaven is full of angels with spirit- 
ual bodies like ours. Where did they come from ? 
If they were not born there, did God speak them 
all instantaneously into being out of utter nothing- 
ness ? No ! for God works always by organic and 
uniform laws ; from centres to circumferences, from 



OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 47 

atoms to masses, from chaos to order, by definite 
steps, series and degrees. 

Angels were not created before men, as is com- 
monly supposed. The story of the fall of angels 
from heaven is purely symbolical. All angels have 
been men or women on some earth of our material 
universe. There is no form higher or purer or 
holier than the human form ; no destiny loftier than 
the human destiny. The final end of creation is a 
heaven of angels. If that could have been attained 
in the beginning by a spiritual creation alone, 
what were the use of a physical life with all its 
imperfections? — of a race of men with all their 
sufferings ? 

The inference from this is, that the physical uni- 
verse is the necessary, first-created and utterly 
indestructible basis of the spiritual; an inference 
pregnant with philosophical and theological truth. 

The old dispensation teaches that the natural 
body, after having been resolved into its original 
gaseous elements, will be suddenly re-composed 
and then changed in the twinkling of an eye into 
a spiritual body. A natural thing transformed into 
a spiritual thing ! This dogma, so revolting to 
reason, science, common sense and a true concep- 
tion of divine laws, is blindly accepted in the 



48 THE OTHER LIFE. 

Christian Church, because it seems to be taught in 
the letter of the Bible. 

More rationally and philosophically, Sweden- 
borg, from actual observation, affirms that the nat- 
ural and spiritual bodies co-exist from birth ; that 
death occurs when their union is sundered ; that 
the resurrection from the dead is the extrication of 
the spiritual body from the natural, which occurs 
just after death. Death, the resurrection, the judg- 
ment, the end of the world, the second coming of 
the Lord, all receive far more rational interpreta- 
tions in the new than were given them in the old 
theology. Swedenborg's is indeed the apotheosis 
of truth, elevating it from sensuous interpretations 
to spiritual life — to divinity. 

The soul, therefore, which can never exist or be 
manifested for a moment without a spiritual body, 
has on earth an additional and temporary covering, 
through which it is brought for a while into sensi- 
ble communication with the objects of the natural 
world. It renounces this external garment at 
death, never to resume it, for all the conditions of 
its being and of its happiness are amply provided 
in a spiritual world. 

We are, therefore, living all the time in our spir- 
itual bodies. Every thought, emotion and sensa- 



OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 49 

tion is a condition or state of that spiritual body 
although we now refer them to the natural. It is 
through our spiritual bodies that we are brought 
into contact with spirits, with heavenly or infernal 
powers. Our affections and thoughts communi- 
cate, although we are not conscious of it, with the 
spheres of affection and thought which exist in the 
spiritual world. -Our spiritual body is already an 
unconscious, invisible member of some society in 
heaven or hell. It is indeed continually moving 
or changing its place in the spiritual world, accord- 
ing to our interior changes of thought and affection, 
of conduct and life. Our spiritual senses are ordi- 
narily closed during our earthly sojourn, and we 
are unconscious of this interior or double life. At 
death our natural senses are closed or perish, and 
we enter consciously into the senses of the spiritual 
body and upon the purely spiritual life ; or rather 
the spiritual senses (previously closed) are then 
opened. 

It is because our natural and spiritual bodies 
exist one within the other, that our spiritual senses 
may be opened into the spiritual world, and we 
may see, hear and converse with spirits and angels 
while still living on the earth. This fact not only 
renders the state of Swedenborg clear to the mind, 



50 THE OTHER LIFE. 

but it explains some of the most mysterious as well 
as most beautiful portions of the Scripture. The 
appearance of angels to men, the visions of the 
prophets, the wonders of the Apocalypse, the 
transfiguration of Christ and many other myste- 
ries, are brought within the range of intelligent 
comprehension, and faith illumined by reason is no 
longer blind. The objections of the skeptic are 
removed and the doubts of the Christian are dissi- 
pated. 

No spiritual being ever did or can assume a ma- 
terial form and appear to men. Even God could 
not assume a physical form except by the organic 
processes of conception, birth and growth. On the 
other hand no man ever did or can penetrate with 
the material senses into a spiritual sphere. Spirit- 
ual objects can only be seen by the spiritual eye. 
Spiritual sounds can only be heard by the spiritual 
ear. The coexistence of two kinds of senses, one 
of which is ordinarily closed but which may be 
opened at the divine pleasure, is the only rational 
ground upon which a communication between 
heaven and earth can be explained. Ignorance 
of the coexistence of the natural and spiritual 
bodies with their separate spheres of perception, is 



OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 51 

the main cause of the prevailing darkness and 
skepticism about spiritual things. 

During our earth-life we seem to ourselves to 
see, hear and feel only from physical causes. We 
look downward and outward entirely. We know 
nothing consciously of our interior, spiritual life. 
Nature stands before us, as a vast, crushing, inex- 
orable reality; heaven floats afar off as a shadow 
or a dream. The spiritual is unheard, unseen, un- 
co mprehended : present to us only in the pictures 
of hope, the whisperings of faith, and the intui- 
tions of love ! 

At death the windows of our natural house are 
all shut ; the rooms are ail empty. The tenement 
is deserted, silent, dark, useless; abandoned to the 
ravages of time and the elements. The windows 
of our spiritual house then open out upon the 
beauties and glories of the spiritual world. The 
rooms are radiant with eternal light ; the halls are 
echoing with celestial music ; the portals are over- 
arched with immortal flowers. We are thenceforth 
dead to nature ; and our friends, poor prisoners in 
time and space, see us no more. 

How wonderful ! how beautiful it is ! that both 
kinds of senses, the spiritual and the natural, can 
be kept simultaneously open, and that a man can 



52 THE OTHER LIFE. 

look out from his double eyes into both worlds ; 
hear from his double ears the music of each, and 
converse one moment with angels and the next with 
men ! 

Such was the state of Swedenborg. 
* Such was the state of the prophets and apostles 
and of all men who have communicated audibly 
and visibly with the spiritual world. The possi- 
bility of such a state is latent in every human soul. 
The probability of its repetition depends upon the 
needs of the Church and the spiritual development 
of the race. 

. The spiritual body which lives in the natural 
body may or may not be a perfect image and like- 
ness of its material covering. Sometimes it is very 
dissimilar, so that the face of the external man is 
unlike the face of his indwelling spirit. The reason 
of this is, that our natural bodies are derived from 
our parents and bear the imprint of many heredi- 
tary forces. They belong to the fixed things of na- 
ture and are only changeable within certain limits. 
But our spiritual bodies are moulded by our own 
appropriation of the goodness and truth which 
Divine Providence furnishes for our spiritual suste- 
nance. As we subdue our hereditary evils and ad- 



OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 53 

vance in regeneration, our spiritual forms become 
more and more beautiful. 

Thus a poor creature, crooked and bleared and 
blighted in body, but loving God and the neighbor 
sincerely, may possess a spiritual form of exquisite 
proportions and beauty. On the other hand the most 
enchanting face and figure in the world may con- 
ceal a spiritual body of hideous ugliness — an ugli- 
ness occasioned by pride, falsehood, avarice or the 
supreme love of self. 

The spiritual body has, however, a considerable 
influence in moulding the natural body to its own 
likeness. If our natural life were indefinitely pro- 
longed, it would probably effect this in all cases. 
The features of old people reveal their spiritual his- 
tory. What sweetness and serenity in some faces ! 
what pinched, selfish, anxious, scowling expressions 
in others ! If sin had committed no ravages in the 
soul, old people would be as beautiful as infants. 

How often also are the homeliest features enno- 
bled and beautified by the sweetness and purity of 
a great and gentle spirit ! How often are the fair- 
est lineaments sensualized and darkened by wicked 
lusts and false persuasions, as the knightly face of 
Sir Launcelot was marked and marred by "the 
great and guilty love he bore the queen !" 



54 THE OTHER LIFE. 

After death, during the processes of exploration 
and judgment by which the good and evil elements 
in our characters are for ever separated, the spirit- 
ual body undergoes remarkable changes. In our 
final spiritual state two faces are impossible. When 
we die, we drop the natural face which sometimes 
is a mask concealing the spiritual face from the 
view of others. Freed from the imperfections of 
the natural life, and from the limitations of time 
and space, the soul develops rapidly. The external 
nature is dropped or becomes quiescent, and the 
interior good or evil comes to the surface, and 
stamps itself ineffaceably on the open countenance. 
Swedenborg says that some persons he had known 
in their earth-life changed after death beyond the 
possibility of recognition. These changes were 
outgrowths of their genuine spiritual characters. 

The beauty of the spiritual bodies of those who 
are principled in mutual love which is the life of 
heaven, is altogether indescribable. Swedenborg 
says he saw celestial angels of such ineffable beauty, 
that the greatest painter on earth could not portray 
the thousandth part of it. And this beauty goes 
on increasing perpetually with the additions to their 
goodness and truth, which are the secret springs of 
all spiritual beauty. 



OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 55 

If the good become so beautiful and the evil so 
deformed and hideous, how shall we know our 
friends and acquaintances who have long ago en- 
tered the spiritual world ? The states of the soul, 
however long past and forgotten, are treasured up 
in the interior or spiritual memory. When these 
states are recalled, the spiritual body may resume 
the exact appearance, even with all the surround- 
ings, which existed when those states were expe- 
rienced on earth. Suppose a husband newly de- 
ceased wishes to identify a long-lost wife who has 
become an angel. When the memory of the wed- 
ding-night is awakened in the woman's mind, and 
the states of affection then existing are recalled 
into activity, the bride of his early love stands 
before him in the very bridal-robes she wore and 
with the same face and. features to the minutest 
particulars. So any and every state of a spirit's 
life may be recalled, revived and pictorially re- 
enacted. These are "the Books" which will be 
opened at our judgment. 

These changes, representative of interior states, 
are the only metamorphoses that our spiritual 
bodies undergo. The idea that spirits can assume 
any form they please, that they can appear in any 
other than the human form, that they can descend 



56 THE OTHER LIFE. 

into the physical world in a material body, is a 
vulgar superstition. The spiritual body is to the 
spiritual world what the natural body is to the 
natural world. It is a real, definite, indestruct- 
ible form, composed of spiritual substances which 
can never by any process get into the natural world 
and make itself objective to the natural senses. 

That spirits sometimes appear at a distance in 
the spiritual world as lambs or wolves or serpents, 
depends upon the laws of correspondence and the 
operation of spheres, which are explained by the 
constitution of the spiritual world itself. Spirits 
are not metamorphosed into those creatures, 
for they appear constantly to themselves in the 
human form. But those creatures are presented to 
view as symbolically revealing the spiritual cha- 
racter of the persons they represent. When it is 
said that the evil one appeared in the form of a 
serpent or a dragon, it is meant that those mon- 
sters picture forth to the eye the corrupt sensual 
principle which is the animating power of hell. 
When it said that the Holy Spirit descended in 
the form of a dove, the dove simply represents the 
innocence and purity of the divine nature. 

Why does not the spiritual body also die, being 
composed of organs and tissues so similar to those 



OUR SPIRITUAL BODIES. 57 

of the natural body? Because the spiritual body- 
is the ultimate and basis of the soul, and the soul 
is immortal. Our natural bodies are of temporal 
use, because birth, growth, and discipline in the 
lowest sphere are necessary to the soul in its first 
evolutions. In due time the soul must expand and 
achieve the higher possibilities of its nature. It 
therefore rises from its worn-out and useless nat- 
ural form, as the butterfly rises from the body of 
the grub-worm. Does the butterfly ever return 
into the body of the worm ? There are no back- 
ward steps in nature or in the soul. 

The spirits and angels who conversed with Swe- 
denborg Avere touched with a certain sorrowful 
indignation, that men upon earth, and especially 
Christians believing the Word of God, entertained 
such vague and absurd ideas about the nature of 
the soul and the life after death, amounting to no 
idea at all, and closing the mind by sensuous fal- 
lacies against the light of truth. They rejoiced 
that Swedenborg had been intromitted into the 
spiritual sphere, so that he could teach mankind 
from actual observation, that a spirit is only a 
more perfect and beautiful man, living in an im- 
mortal human form and enjoying all the senses 
which we here attribute to the human bodv. 



CHAPTER III. 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 



HE who supposes that there are spiritual essences 
abstracted from organic forms, is startled by 
the use of such terms as bodies, senses, sensations, 
sight, hearing, speech, etc., in relation to the other 
life. 

How can there be any conscious life, natural or 
spiritual, without sensation f Sensation, and per- 
ception which is only a more interior sensation, are 
the states of the spirit itself in the act of recogniz- 
ing the existence and qualities of things. 

All life flows in from above. Its forms are 
studied by observation and reflection, but they 
must be first perceived by sensation. Therefore in 
the spiritual world, nearer, to the divine source of 
all things, we have life in greater fullness and sen- 
sation in greater perfection. 

Sensation is effected by contact or a very near 
approach to it. All sensation is touch. It is touch 
which brings us into relation with a universe out- 

58 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 59 

side of ourselves. We touch the physical objects 
about us with delicate nerve-cells sheathed in soft 
and pliant tissues. We touch the flowers through 
an aromal atmosphere which circulates around 
them as our own great atmosphere envelops our 
globe. Through the medium of an undulating 
air, breaking in delicate waves upon our auditory 
nerves, we touch the mighty organ as it breathes in 
music and the distant clouds as they smite in thun- 
der. Through the infinitesimal vibrations of a 
luminous ether, we touch the mountain-tops and 
the stars and the sun. 

Through similar and corresponding atmospheres 
and media, composed of spiritual substances, our 
spiritual senses come into contact with the spiritual 
world. We touch or communicate with each other 
in our thoughts and affections, with spiritual ob- 
jects around us, with heavenly societies near or 
remote, and with God himself. Wonderful and 
beautiful is the parallelism or correspondence be- 
tween the natural and the spiritual worlds in all 
their forms, forces and phenomena ! 

In the spiritual world as in the natural, there 
are three discrete degrees of attenuated substances, 
which receive and present or make objective the 
influxes of divine love and wisdom into created 



60 THE OTHER LIFE. 

forms. The aura is the medium of heat, the ether 
the medium of light, and the atmosphere the me- 
dium of motion and sound. 

The aura of the spiritual world contains the 
divine love in its bosom which is manifested as 
spiritual heat. The ether of the spiritual world is 
a sacred garment of light manifesting the divine 
wisdom so far as it can be manifested to the spirit- 
ual eye. These forces radiate from the Sun of the 
spiritual world, which appears before the face of 
spirits and angels similar to our sun but far 
brighter; and that sun is the first and central pro- 
ceeding, outbirth and objective embodiment of the 
Divine Life. The atmosphere of the spiritual 
world is a vast aerial ocean like ours, bearing in 
its bosom the higher and more subtile spiritual 
forces. It receives, absorbs and reflects the divine 
heat and light, and tempers them to the state of 
the spirits and angels who live and move in it. 

The organic forms of both worlds are similar 
and exist in different series and degrees. There are 
solids and liquids and gases and aromas, and prob- 
ably modifications of spiritual substance still more 
subtile and mysterious. To bring us into contact 
with all these things — this cosmos which reveals to 
us the glory of God, different senses are required 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 61 

and different organs, through which the varying 
sensations may be manifested. Hence the eye, the 
ear, the nose, the mouth and the skin, with all 
their beautiful organic forms — forms as necessary 
in the spiritual as in the natural world. 

The spiritual body has, therefore, its spiritual 
senses ; its sight and hearing, its smell, its taste, its 
touch. 

It is very difficult for persons trained in the old 
theology to believe they are dead, after they have 
passed permanently out of the natural into the 
spiritual world. They find themselves men as 
before, in form and structure, in functions, pas- 
sions and opinions. They are surrounded by a 
visible universe built up of forms similar to those 
with which they are already familiar. Towns and 
cities tower upon the hill-tops or gleam by the sea ; 
the road meanders in the meadow ; the river rip- 
ples in the valley : the birds sing in the air ; the 
flocks browse in the field ; the mountains lift their 
azure pyramids to the sky ; and a great sun shines 
serenely over all. 

The new-comer from the earth, expecting to find 
himself a "disembodied spirit," gazes around in 
mute astonishment. He questions himself, into 
what other strange and beautiful physical world, 



62 THE OTHER LIFE. 

and by what miracle he has been transported. 
Then some dearly-loved one approaches, some 
friend long lost, long folded from his vision in 
the light of heaven, and proceeds to instruct him 
about the differences between the spiritual and the 
natural world, which underlie the apparent resem- 
blance, and thus to lift the veil of darkness from 
his spiritual sight. 

What good spirits and angels do for men newly 
deceased, Swedenborg by divine permission has 
done for the Church and the world. To those at 
least who accept from his illuminated pages the 
philosophy of heaven, the Word of God is no 
longer a sealed book. Death is no longer a leap 
in the dark, nor the resurrection afar off, nor the 
spiritual world a dream ! 

The differences between the spiritual and the 
natural world flow from the difference which exists 
between the suns, which are their respective cen- 
tres, and which, each in its own sphere, creates, 
illumines and animates all around it. 

The natural sun is supposed to contain matter in 
a state of constant and intense ignition; whence 
there are emanations of heat and light. The sun 
of the spiritual world is life itself, the first proceed- 
ing from the Divine Essence; and its emanations 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 63 

are love and wisdom. The natural world was not 
called into being by the breath of God and set 
afloat with independent forces and qualities, utterly 
divorced from the spiritual spheres. On the con- 
trary it is created from moment to moment by the 
inflowing life of the spiritual world. The spiritual 
sun flows into the natural sun by correspondence, 
and animates it as the soul animates the body. 
The love of the spiritual sphere becomes the heat 
of the natural; the wisdom of the spiritual be- 
comes the light of the natural ; the organic forms 
of the spiritual become the organizing, life-giving 
forces of the natural, 

Our natural philosophers and astronomers seri- 
ously calculate how long the light and heat of the 
natural world will last ! They estimate the time 
in which they will be exhausted by radiation from 
the solar surface. They predict a far-off period 
when the sun will grow cold and dark, and the 
planetary system perish in the frozen abysses of an 
eternal night. Blind leaders of the blind ! 

The natural sun exists and is fed by the perpetual 
influx of the spiritual sun into its inmost recesses. 
Its heat and light will endure so long as the love 
and wisdom of God, flowing through a spiritual 
sun, continue to create and sustain the universe. 



64 THE OTHER LIFE. 

The earth is established that it can never be 
moved. The physical universe is the coexisting 
and indestructible basis of the spiritual. It is the 
footstool of the Lord. 

This view of the connection between spirit and 
matter by influx and correspondence, starting from 
two co-existing solar centres, and thence pervading 
every form and atom of both the natural and spirit- 
ual worlds, is alike remarkable for its grandeur 
and its simplicity, the two essentials of a universal 
truth. It is the pivotal point around which will 
revolve a new and perfect philosophy, that shall 
make more music in the human mind than the 
fabled music of the spheres. 

Heat and light are primary forces from which 
all others are derived. Every substance has form 
and properties determined by its relations to heat 
and light. So every spiritual form or idea has 
relation to love and wisdom, or what is synony- 
mous, to goodness and truth, which are the heat 
and light of the spiritual world. This duality of 
relation is universal. Every thought in the Word 
of God has a specific relation to goodness and truth, 
or to the will and understanding, which is some- 
times beautifully unfolded by Swedenborg. 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 65 

In this world we only perceive heat as heat, light 
as light. We have an intuitive perception that 
spiritual heat has some relation to love, and that 
spiritual light is in some way analogous to wisdom. 
But we have not grasped the idea which Sweden- 
borg offers us, that love and wisdom are spiritual 
substances and powers acting upon the soul as heat 
and light act upon the body. In the other life we 
shall have the same sensation of heat and light 
which we have here ; but in addition and by means 
of interior faculties, now shut but which will then 
be open, we will perceive the simultaneous inflow- 
ing of love into the will and of thought into the 
understanding. 

How can it be made comprehensible to the natu- 
ral mind that the light of the spiritual world is 
actually wisdom, intelligence, thought? 

Swedenborg says : 

" That the light of heaven has in it intelligence 
and wisdom, and that it is the intelligence of truth 
and the wisdom of good from the Lord, which 
appears as light before the eyes of the angels, has 
been given me to know by living experience. I 
have been elevated into that light, which glittered 
like the light radiating from diamonds, and whilst I 
was kept in it, I seemed to myself to be withdrawn 

6* 



66 THE OTHER LIFE. 

from corporeal ideas and to be led into spiritual 
ideas." 

Again he says : 

" The more intelligent the angels are, in so much 
the greater and brighter light are they. The differ- 
ences of light in heaven are as many as are the 
angelic societies which constitute heaven — yea, as 
many as are the angels in each society." 

In the natural world all men enjoy the same 
light and see the same objects — because the emana- 
tions from our sun are material. In the spiritual 
world that sameness of vision is impossible, because 
spirits differ in the reception of the divine love and 
wisdom which alone in that sphere produce the 
phenomena of heat and light. Every spirit feels 
and sees by the heat and light which he has appro- 
priated from the spiritual sun. The light about 
him comes from within him, and the objects he sees 
reveal or express to him the divine love and wis- 
dom, as they appear from his own special stand- 
point and through himself as the medium. This is 
the secret of the great fact, that every spirit creates 
his own heaven or hell, his own house, his own 
external scenery, his own social life. 

If your spirit could be conducted through many 
spiritual and celestial spheres one after another, 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 67 

you would discover that in each sphere, a different 
influx of ideas and perceptions took place in your 
mind. You would be intromited into states of 
intelligence and wisdom ineffable. All the learn- 
ing of all the men in our world would be a trifle 
to it. It would not be wisdom acquired by your 
own efforts, but it would come instantly into your 
mind with the light of the sphere into which you 
entered. Changes of light in heaven are changes 
of thought. 

If the heat of your life, the animal heat of your 
spirit, if we may use the term, did not correspond 
to the light into which you were elevated, that light 
would soon fade away and all the lightning flash of 
wisdom it had brought would disappear and be 
remembered only as an unspeakable dream. This 
occurred to Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, when 
he was elevated to the third heaven. 

In this world where heat and light may be sepa- 
rated in a measure, an evil man may possess much 
spiritual knowledge, and a good man may live in 
such mental darkness that he believes the greatest 
absurdities as sincerely as if they were rational 
truths. In the other life where the interiors and 
exteriors of the mind are made to correspond, this 
is rectified. We only see and understand finally 



68 THE OTHER LIFE. 

what we love; for light comes from heat and wis- 
dom comes from love. 

Swedeuborg has a beautiful line which ought to 
be the motto of every church or association of men : 

"Ex concordialux ; exdiscordia umbra." 

From union of hearts comes light ; from discord, 
darkness. 

A church or society of men banded together 
without genuine brotherly love, is a mere debating- 
society where discussions produce only confusion 
and doubt. The reason why such beautiful light 
and such magnificent objects exist in every heav- 
enly society is, that the members are organized on 
the basis of love to God and each other, the gen- 
uine source of all spiritual light. 

The atmospheres of light about the heavenly 
societies are indescribably beautiful. Some of 
them are of silvery, some of golden hues. Some 
have the sheen of pearls or diamonds or other 
precious stones. Some appear to be composed of 
brilliant infinitesimal flowers; some of the mi- 
nutest rainbows wonderfully woven together ; and 
others of the microscopic faces of infants and 
cherubs. The light of our world is feeble and 
dim in comparison with the flaming splendors of 
those heavenlv societies in which the love of God 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 69 

is the heat that animates and the wisdom of God is 
the light that surrounds them. 

The appearance of a light or a great light is 
indicative of the revelation of truth. Moses was 
called to his task by the light of the burning bush. 
The divine will was revealed to the high priest of 
the Jews by the miraculous variegations of light 
in the precious stones which glittered upon his 
bosom. The wise men of the East were led to the 
infant Saviour by the light of a star. Paul was 
summoned to his better mission by a great light 
that shone on his way. For a long time before 
Swedenborg's spiritual sight was opened, he was 
visited by wonderful and beautiful lights shining 
around him, glittering prophecies of the heavenly 
truths about to be communicated through him to 
the Church and the world. 

Yes, spiritual light is truth ; and our spiritual 
eyes are the organs which receive it for the soul's 
contemplation and delight. The manifestation de- 
pends upon the state of the organ. There is a 
spiritual blindness as ~7tll as a natural blindness — 
an inability to discern spiritual truth, no matter 
how beautifully or forcibly presented. Spiritual 
truth cannot be seen by the carnal eye ; that is, by 
men who are immersed in the love of self and the 



70 THE OTHER LIFE. 

world, who are busied with the pursuit of money, 
pleasure, power, fashion, or pre-eminence, and who 
look to the external forms of things instead of to 
the interior life. 

Our spiritual bodies, which are the perfect forms 
of men and women, have hearts which beat, lungs 
which respire, tongues that speak and ears that 
hear. 

"And I heard a voice from heaven as the voice 
of many waters, and as the voice of a great thun- 
der; and I heard the voice of harpers harping 
with their harps ; and they sang as it were a new 
song before the throne." 

The voices of angels are described by Sweden- 
borg as being indescribably sweet and beautiful. 
He saw a hard-hearted spirit who involuntarily 
wept upon hearing an angel's voice, for he said 
that it seemed to him that love itself was speaking. 
On the contrary the voices of evil spirits are harsh 
and discordant, and their interchange of ideas 
sometimes sounds at a distance like wailing and 
the gnashing of teeth. 

The songs of angels, individually and in choirs, 
constitute one of the greatest enjoyments of the 
other life. Imagine a city in heaven, every house 
of which is a palace, and whose architectural glo- 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 71 

ries are bathed in the purple splendors of a celestial 
morn. Every window is thrown open to greet the 
spiritual sun which is representative of the Lord. 
Thousands of beautiful and happy spirits present 
themselves to view, clad as the angels are, and all 
voices join in singing a morning song of praise and 
joy, of such divine harmony that the whole soul 
is thrilled and melted with delight. This did 
Swedenborg see and -hear. 

Yes, music exists in heaven. It is indeed the 
voice of heaven, because it is the external form or 
medium through which the purest heavenly affec- 
tions are expressed and communicated. 

There is more in speech than the communication 
of ideas. That is but one half of the phenome- 
non. Ideas in the spiritual world may indeed be 
communicated without speech. One spirit coming 
to another takes on his entire memory in a moment, 
knows all he knows, thinks all he thinks. They 
can read each other's thought without exchanging 
an audible word. What then is the necessity of 
speech? of sound conveyed atmospherically from 
the mouth of one spirit to the ear of another? 

It is because the affections of the speaker are 
involved and unfolded in the sound of his voice. 
There is a, difference between the words and the 



72 THE OTHER LIFE. 

sound. The words convey the sense or idea ; the 
sound conveys the affection which originated and 
sustains the idea. Angels can detect in the sound 
of a man's voice the ruling loves and passions of 
his soul, and thence the secret key to his whole 
mental and moral nature. 

This is the reason why a thing heard makes a 
more powerful impression than the same thing read ; 
why oratory and music are more potent than the 
divinest philosophy ; and why the pulpit, the bar, 
the stage, the forum are such mighty powers in the 
world. 

Here, too, we see the necessity of public worship, 
in which divine truths are presented to the ear by 
speaking and singing. This is calculated to excite 
a sphere of devout affections which are insensibly 
communicated from one to another. The silent 
reading of a written sermon is a poor substitute for 
the magnetic fervor of the living voice, and the 
sweet brotherhood of choral music, which fire the 
heart with religious sentiment and stimulate the 
will to the obedient performance of religious 
duties. 

The Christian who is not ready to speak, sing 
and pray with his brethren, to feel, think and act 
in a sort of choral harmony with the children of 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 73 

God, cannot pass the threshold of heaven. He 
will be kept in the world of spirits nntil he is 
instructed and purified, disciplined and trained to 
a sacred communism, rid of his selfhood and his 
selfishness, so that he is willing to lose his individ- 
ual life in the larger life of the body and members 
of Christ. 

We are not surprised that Swedenborg says there 
are churches and preaching and sacred music in 
heaven. What could be more rational? They do 
not constitute all of heaven indeed, but the most 
essential part of it. The communion of thought 
and affection thus established and fostered in the 
religious sphere of the soul, is the true secret of the 
infinite order, beauty, peace and joy, which reign 
perpetually in the social and civil spheres, and in 
all the external relations of the heavenly life. 

Sound is to the ear what sight is to the eye. The 
seven notes of the musical scale correspond to the 
seven colors into which a ray of white light may be 
decomposed. There is, indeed, a series of wonder- 
ful parallelisms running through all the forms and 
forces of nature. These are simple repetitions upon 
different planes or discrete degrees of creation, of the 
fundamental laws and principles of the divine love 
and- wisdom. 

7 T> 



74 THE OTHER LIFE. 

Sight and hearing depend upon the organic state 
of the eye and ear, those instruments through which 
the soul sees and hears. Some people are blind to 
certain colors; some are deaf to certain sounds. 
There are, indeed, sounds too high or too low to be 
heard by our ears. The same is no doubt analogi- 
cally true of colors. 

There is a spiritual blindness in which no ray 
of truth can be discerned ; a spiritual deafness in 
which the voice of God is unregarded. There are 
spiritual thoughts which have never come within 
the range of our vision ; spiritual harmonies which 
have never fallen upon our ear. There lies about 
us, indeed, a vast, invisible, inaudible universe full 
of spiritual beauty and glory. Our natural eye 
does not respond to the undulations of its ether; 
our natural ear does not catch the vibrations of its 
air. We scarcely credit its existence. 

Our spiritual ears, which will be permanently 
opened at death, may be opened while living, and 
the voices of angels made audible. The spiritual 
hearing may be opened whilst the spiritual sight is 
closed and vice versd. The little child Samuel 
heard with his spiritual ear the voice of the Lord, 
which did not reach the hearing of the listening 
Eli. 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 75 

When Swedenborg sat in his library conversing 
with angels and gazing upon heavenly scenes, 
nothing was visible or audible to friends who might 
have been standing by. Nor did Swedenborg have 
any specific consciousness that he saw and heard 
with spiritual organs. So thoroughly, indeed, do 
our natural and spiritual organs correspond and fit 
into each other, that a man with his spiritual senses 
open seems to himself to see and hear everything, 
just as he always did, with the natural eye and ear. 

Paul was elevated, he says, to the third heaven, 
and saw and heard things which were unutterable ; 
but so similar is our spiritual body to our natural 
body, our spiritual senses to our natural senses, the 
spiritual world in external appearance to the natu- 
ral world, that Paul was sorely puzzled, and de- 
clares that whether he was in the body or out of the 
body, he could not tell. His sensations told him 
that he was in the body ; but his theoretic faculty 
demanded to know how he could be in the third 
heaven with angels and still retain all his natural 
faculties and sensations. 

Swedenborg alone explains this and other bibli- 
cal difficulties, by furnishing a true psychology, the 
result, not of metaphysical speculations, but of the 
observation and study of man from the spiritual 



76 THE OTHER LIFE. 

side. And while he lifts the literal veil which 
conceals the real meaning of the Bible, his own 
doctrines on every subject are best and most forci- 
bly illustrated and confirmed from the pages of 
Scripture. 

The possession of the perfect human form, male 
or female, after death, and of spiritual sight and 
hearing, being conceded, the existence of the other 
senses cannot be denied. We have smell, taste and 
touch in the spiritual world. We have spiritual 
nerves which exactly correspond to the nerves of 
our physical body. It was in those spiritual nerves, 
indeed^ that all our sensations of pain or pleasure 
occurred. When we drop the natural body, the 
real man with all his organs, emotions, thoughts, 
memories, sensations and possibilities, is simply 
withdrawn or extracted from it to lead on a higher 
plane a continued and better life. 

Such is the resurrection from the dead! 

Odors, like sounds and colors, are representative 
of the spiritual states of those from whom they pro- 
ceed. Spirits detect by the sense of smell the qual- 
ity of approaching spirits. Sweet and delicious 
odors accompany good spirits as direct emanations 
from their spiritual life. Heaven is full of the 
aroma of flowers and of the balmy fragrance of 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 11 

woods and fields. The souls of the rose, the violet, 
the mignonette, and the myriads of their charming 
sisters, float for ever as haloes of sweetness about 
the persons of the good, the pure and the beau- 
tiful. 

The sense of taste is very obscure in the spiritual 
world ; indeed almost null, almost dropped and left 
behind with those who enjoy the pleasures of the 
table on earth. There is no cooking in heaven ; no 
gastronomic enjoyments. Eating there seems to be 
rare and little, a mere ceremonial, symbolical of 
spiritual appropriations as the Lord's Supper is 
upon earth. The reason of this is, that the spirit- 
ual body is not kept in form and life like the natu- 
ral body by a regular supply aud waste of inert 
material, but by a continual condensation or con- 
cretion of the inmost substances of the spiritual 
atmospheres, which concretion is effected by an 
emotional and intellectual appropriation of the di- 
vine love and truth which pervade those atmo- 
spheres. The spiritual bodies of infants grow in 
heaven by this process. 

If any one objects to this idea of the condensa- 
tion or concretion of invisible atmospheric sub- 
stances into solid forms, we will remind him that 
it is the very process by which our own world has 

7* 



78 THE OTHER LIFE. 

been constructed. Our entire globe was once gas- 
eous or atmospheric, then aqueous and afterward 
solid. The soil we walk upon is a deposit from 
the atmosphere. Our natural bodies are gases 
temporarily solidified by chemical affinities. 

All the pleasurable sensations evolved from the 
touch, exist in heaven and in the highest state of 
perfection. The delights which flow from this 
mode of communicating the affections are almost 
unintelligible to us who still linger in the shadows 
of the natural life. 

The sins of the spirit are effigied in mournful 
symbols by the diseases of the body and the disor- 
ders of the physical universe. Painful sensations 
belong only to the natural world, the world of 
spirits and hell. There is no pain in heaven. 

"And God shall wipe away all tears from their 
eyes : and there shall be no more death, neither 
sorrow nor crying : neither shall there be any more 
pain : for the former things are passed away." 

Physical pain comes from the distorted media 
into which the nerve-life of the spirit flows, 
whether a broken bone, a morbid growth, an 
inflamed tissue or a changed function. Spiritual 
pain comes from the influx of the divine life into 
perverted, disorderly and unregenerate spiritual 



OUR SPIRITUAL SENSES. 79 

forms. God flows forth continually with love, 
wisdom, peace, joy, for all his creatures. They 
turn themselves away from Him, and all his bless- 
ings are turned into their opposites. Love is 
turned into hate; the true into the false; heat 
into cold ; light into darkness ; peace into strife ; 
joy into sorrow ; pleasure into pain. 

The views of Swedenborg about the spiritual 
world and the spiritual senses are forcibly illus- 
trated and confirmed by the developments of Mes- 
merism and Biology, all of which have been made 
since Swedenborg unfolded the principles of psy- 
chology, from which alone they can be understood. 
He explains in the most satisfactory manner the 
phenomena of thought-reading, clairvoyance, mag- 
netic vision, magnetic hearing, the transference of 
sensations, the induction of fantasy and the influ- 
ence of spheres. These wonderful phenomena, 
although as well authenticated as anything can 
be, are still discredited by the theologians, meta- 
physicians and scientists of the old schools, because 
they can neither explain nor use them. That 
order of minds which would not and could not 
believe, "though one rose from the dead," is not 
yet extinct." 



CHAPTER IV. 

OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 

MYRIADS of souls being given, inhabiting 
spiritual bodies which see, hear and feel ; 
organized into heavenly societies ; each soul full 
of affections and thoughts flowing down by inte- 
rior ways from the divine source of all life ; some 
method of communicating their ideas is an imper- 
ative necessity. 

Hence speech and writing in heaven as well as 
upon earth. 

There is no life without motion, circulation, com- 
munication, interchange. The subtile currents of 
heat, light, electricity, and of aromal and effluvial 
particles are continually coming and going to and 
from every object in the material universe both 
great and small. Everything receives something 
from all other things and gives something to them. 
The light of the stars visits not only the planets in 
their majestic sweep around the sun, but every leaf 
that trembles in the wood and every pebble that 

80 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 81 

lies upon the shore. The wing of the bee in the 
garden beats at the palace-gate of the cloud, and 
the dew-drop on the flower holds up its little 
mirror to the sky. 

So it is with affections and thoughts, which are 
spiritual things. 

It is the life of heaven to receive affections and 
thoughts from the divine love and wisdom of the 
Lord, and to communicate them to others. This 
involves the love of God and of the neighbor, 
which is all the law and the prophets. 

Affection and thought are united like soul and 
body, and correspond to each other. Every 
thought contains an affection as its secret essence 
and soul. Every idea which one spirit communi- 
cates to another, embodies something of his emo- 
tional as well as his intellectual nature. Angels 
continually yearn to give themselves away to 
others. 

There are three great modes of expression by 
which the spiritual life of one soul manifests itself 
to others. 

The first is by the variations of the face and the 

movements of the body. These changes in the 

bodily form are symbolical of the affections and 

thoughts which produce them. What a world of 

T) * 



82 THE OTHER LIFE. 

meaning lies in the smile, the frown, the tear, the 
laugh, and in the numberless gestures of the body ! 
Our perception of these meanings is very obscure 
and faint ; but the celestial angels who can read a 
man's entire life in the sound of his voice or the 
shape of his hand, find them a means of perfect 
communication. The face of nature also is as intelli- 
gible to them as the face of man, and through it 
God speaks to them a language of infinite wisdom 
and beauty. 

This enables us in some degree to comprehend 
Swedenborg's statement, that this mode of express- 
ing ideas, which seems to us a mere pantomime, is 
the most thorough and wonderful method of inter- 
changing thought. Swedenborg says : " This speech 
as far excelled vocal speech as the sense of seeing 
excels that of hearing — that is, as the sight of a fine 
country excels a verbal description of it." 

The first men of our earth conversed with the 
angels in this manner. This perception of the 
spiritual meanings involved in external forms and 
motions has various degrees of power. It is one 
thing in the celestial, another in the spiritual, and 
a far lower and more imperfect faculty in the natu- 
ral degree. It is perception with spirits ; intuition 
with men ; instinct with animals. It is the means 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 83 

whereby creatures without speech communicate 
with each other, and seem to exercise both that 
thought and forethought which we ascribe to 
reason. 

The body in its minutest movements was once a 
perfect effigy of the soul and its affections. Evil 
has so far closed our internal or spiritual forms, 
and separated the internal from the external, that 
little of this correspondence is left or understood. 
We still sometimes feel that the eye is more elo- 
quent than the tongue; that a smile or a kiss con- 
veys something which language could but feebly 
portray; that actions speak louder than words; 
and that the deeds done in the body are a panto- 
mime involving the secret things of our spiritual 
life. 

Speech, face to face, is the second and most com- 
mon method of communicating ideas in the spirit- 
ual realm. There as here we have all the pleasures 
of conversation, which is the sunshine of social life. 
There are happy gatherings of congenial spirits for 
recreation and the interchange of affections and 
thoughts. There are schools of instruction where 
knowledge is imparted with a facility and a fullness, 
which amazes our torpid understandings. There 
are assemblies where words of angelic wisdom fall 



84 THE OTHER LIFE. 

from pure lips and illumine the mind with a heav- 
enly radiance. There are churches where the Word 
of God is unfolded with a beauty and glory, of 
which the human intellect has never yet dreamed. 

What language, then, is spoken in the spiritual 
world ? 

Earthly language is constructed by the slow and 
tedious process of passing from mouth to mouth 
and from generation to generation, certain sounds 
which represent things or states of feeling, until 
their meaning becomes fixed and permanent. These 
slowly-accumulated words, or signs of our ideas, 
differ and have given rise to different languages, 
according as the races of men have started from 
different centres ; were surrounded by different 
natural objects and influences ; and were of different 
mental and spiritual constitutions. 

At the very best, the richest, most copious and 
flexible languages in the world, but feebly represent 
or bring to view the powers and wonders of human 
thought and imagination. 

The language of the spiritual world is the lan- 
guage of ideas, and is therefore common to all 
spirits. The word used by a spirit to convey his 
idea, contains in it innumerable things necessary to 
its perfect representation. When we use the word 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 85 

"mountain," we have the visual image of a moun- 
tain in the mind's eye ; but this image is not con- 
veyed by the sound to a foreigner unacquainted 
with our language. The word used by a spirit to 
convey the idea of " mountain" to the mind, would 
involve not only its form and color, height and dis- 
tance, but the very causes of its formation, the spir- 
itual states represented by it, and its connection, 
near 'and remote, with all other things. 

Ideas, which appear to us so simple, are incon- 
ceivably complex. The spiritual microscope applied 
to ideas, as we apply the natural microscope to 
physical objects, will show us that every idea, 
apparently but one thing, is composed of innumer- 
able other ideas ; and that further analysis, instead 
of bringing us to some definite end, only opens 
before us new worlds of wonder. 

A spiritual word, therefore, contains and repre- 
sents thousands of thoughts. The inconceivable 
richness and fullness of such language make clear 
what Swedenborg says, that angels can express 
more in a minute than we can in an hour; and 
can convey in a few words what it would take us 
many pages to express. 

We have new names given to us in heaven. No 
material word, not even the names of Abraham, 



86 THE OTHER LIFE. 

Isaac and Jacob, can penetrate into the spiritual 
spheres. Our name in heaven will represent our 
entire spiritual quality. Names in the Bible 
always represent spiritual qualities. The "new 
name" written on the white stone is the new nature 
given to us by obedience to spiritual truth. The 
name inscribed in the Lamb's book of life, is the 
spiritual innocence of the regenerate. The name 
of the beast written on the forehead is the quality 
of evil inscribed on the interior life. The name of 
God was called unpronounceable by the Jews, indi- 
cating that the divine quality or essence is incom- 
prehensible by man. 

The words of this spiritual language were not 
constructed arbitrarily, or adopted by common con- 
sent as fixed signs of angelic ideas. They are cre- 
ated instantaneously by the influx of the divine 
life into and through the spiritual mind, and repre- 
sent perfectly the affections and thoughts which 
have come down from within, to embody them- 
selves in communicable sounds without, and be 
thereby transmitted to the neighbor. 

This spiritual language, or language of ideas, is 
not therefore learned or taught like human lan- 
guages, but it is organically implanted in every 
one. We come into conscious possession of it 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 87 

after death, by a spontaneous process, because we 
have it here. When we are thinking intently to 
ourselves, our spiritual body is talking earnestly in 
the spiritual language, of which we are uncon- 
scious. If the Lord were to open the door be- 
tween the two worlds, and let some angel friend 
look in upon us as we sit in profound reverie, our 
tacit thoughts would come to him as rich and 
beautiful words spoken aloud. 

This language has three discrete degrees, and we 
come into that degree of it which is opened in us 
by our life upon earth. The angels in the first 
heaven cannot understand the speech of the angels 
in the second heaven, nor can those in the second 
heaven comprehend the celestial speech of the third 
heaven. This depends upon their different degrees 
of affection and thought, from successively more 
interior grounds, and a corresponding difference in 
ideas and, words. The celestial, spiritual and nat- 
ural degrees of life differ so fundamentally in the 
forms of their affections and thoughts, that each is 
a distinct world, cosmos or universe of its own, 
without any necessary consciousness of the exist- 
ence of any other. 

Still they communicate; for there is a steady 
stream of influent life all the way from the Divine 



OO THE OTHER LIFE. 

Centre through all the spheres down to the lowest 
and last things of the mineral kingdom in the 
physical world. Nothing stands alone in the uni- 
verse. All things cohere, and every cause is trace- 
able to the first Great Cause. How it is that all 
the heavens and hells, the world of spirits and all 
the innumerable worlds of men are held together 
in one vast chain of being, and governed by the 
same laws and controlled by one Divine Order, can 
only be comprehended by the system of ontology 
given to us through Swedenborg. 

Man who is born corporeal and sensual and 
therefore without language like a beast, can ascend 
through the successive degrees of affection and 
thought by the opening of the rational, spiritual 
and celestial faculties, which lie folded away in 
the mysterious depths of his spiritual being. As 
he ascends he becomes capable of more and more 
interior thought and life, and of understanding the 
language of successively higher states. 

The descent of aifection and thought from the 
higher to the lower planes is a very different phe- 
nomenon. The spirit has left the corporeal, sen- 
sual sphere behind it, has ceased to think and feel 
on the external, rational and natural plane. It 
thinks spiritually in the degree next above the one 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 89 

it has left. It has receded from our earthly speech, 
and cannot reproduce a word of it in the new sphere 
into which it has risen. The higher it ascends the 
more it leaves behind, until the celestial angel 
stands on the serenest summits in the light of God, 
with thoughts, feelings, language differing from 
everything beneath him. 

How can a celestial angel communicate with a 
spiritual angel, or an angel of the lower heaven 
communicate with a man upon earth ? By a de- 
scent during which the higher being leaves his own 
interior spheres behind him, and enters into the 
sphere of the lower degree. When a celestial 
angel appears and speaks to a spiritual angel, he 
descends to his level, assumes the form of his 
affection and thought which exists in his interior 
memory, and speaks to him in his own language. 
So when a spiritual angel descends to a lower 
degree, he takes on the mental states and interior 
memory of that degree and speaks in a lower and 
feebler language. 

Angels and spirits, however, cannot descend into 
the natural degree of our life, so as to see our nat- 
ural forms and speak to us externally in our earthly 
tongues. Why? Because they have dropped the 
natural body for ever. They can approach our 



90 THE OTHER LIFE. 

spiritual bodies, be seen by our spiritual eyes and 
beard by our spiritual ears. They then speak tc 
us in our native tongue. 

How ean a spirit who thinks and speaks from 
the universal language of ideas, address a man in 
an earthly language, so that if a dozen men of dif- 
ferent nationalities were listening, each one would 
hear his own language spoken ? This apparent 
mystery is easily explained. 

A man cannot see or hear an angel or spirit 
unless his spiritual senses are open. When a spirit 
comes to such a man, he takes upon himself the 
man's interior or spiritual memory, and enters into 
everything the man possesses as if it were his own. 
His ideas clothe themselves with words derived 
from the man's memory, because the spirit has 
assumed the spiritual state of the man's life and 
now thinks from his standpoint. When he leaves 
the man, he forgets every word of human language, 
and thinks that the message he delivered was 
couched in his own spiritual speech. 

The Divine Wisdom, which is the source of all 
thought, in passing through the minds of the celes- 
tial angels is finitely manifested as the thought or 
wisdom of that degree of life. The angelic thought, 
passing down to the next degree below it, becomes 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 91 

the spiritual wisdom of the middle degree. This, 
flowing down into the world of spirits, shorn in a 
great measure of its beauty and power, becomes 
the thought of that sphere. Passing lastly into 
the spiritual -natural form of man, it is human 
thought, reason, speech. — Thus all things are 
bound together in a golden chain. 

When God would speak to man, his idea first 
takes on the forms of the celestial sphere, and is a 
communication understood only by the celestial 
angels. The same idea passing through the spirit- 
ual degree takes on a covering or mode of expres- 
sion peculiar to that sphere, and is a revelation to 
a lower form of spiritual life. The same divine 
idea reaches man upon earth and is dimly shad- 
owed forth in some homely phrase of human 
speech. 

This fact, that forms of expression are changed 
according to the descent of ideas from the higher 
to the lower degrees, explains our doctrine that the 
Word of God has meaning within meaning, sense 
within sense, adapted to the different degrees of 
life, and that its last and lowest sense, our literal 
Scripture, necessarily takes on the forms and im- 
perfections of human thought and the limitations 
and feebleness of human speech. 



92 THE OTHER LIFE. 

This Word of God is the Mind of God, the 
divine wisdom, one and the same, filling all the 
heavens and reaching down to the earth. 

This is the reason why God is omniscient. He 
is omnipresent, and He takes on or assumes the 
states of thought and feeling which exist in all the 
spheres and every infinitesimal fraction of a sphere 
throughout the entire universe. He therefore 
knows everything, just as the angel knows the con- 
tents of the mind of the spirit whose sphere he 
approaches. 

We see only the letter of the Divine Word. We 
cannot lift our eyes above the feet of the Divine 
Man, which are " like unto fine brass." We can- 
not lift them to his right hand which grasps " the 
seven stars ;" nor to his eyes, which are " as a flame 
of fire." 

This letter of the Word is signified by the 
" clouds of heaven," for it veils the splendors of 
celestial and spiritual wisdom, and accommodates 
the descending light to the natural and even sen- 
sual states of the children of men. When the spir- 
itual sense of the Divine Word is opened, when it 
speaks to us in the angelic language, the Lord is 
said to come in the clouds of heaven (not in the 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 93 

clouds of earth) with power and great glory, 
accompanied by his holy angels. 

Such is the language of God to man. 
The words of spirits and angels represent in 
objective forms their affectional and intellectual 
life. Their forms of speech and power of expres- 
sion differ, therefore, according to their own inte- 
rior states. Whilst all are wise and beautiful, 
some are far wiser and more beautiful than others ; 
and the highest delight of those who have much 
wisdom is to impart it, so far as possible, to those 
who have less. 

Spiritual thought, so full and so symbolic of 
emotional life, has a strong tendency to take on a 
rhythmical, poetic, and musical form. The lan- 
guage of angels is more in the style of the psalms 
of David and of the prophets, than in that of our 
prose compositions. In some heavenly societies, 
indeed, their speech is poetry and the sound of it is 
music. It is probable that the souls of poets and 
musicians are brought into contact with these har- 
monic spheres, and derive from their very cradles, 
by conjunction with such spirits, their constitutional 
passion for music and song. 

Swedenborg says the reason why the speech of 
angels has a tendency to measured cadence and 



94 THE OTHER LIFE. 

rhythmical terminations, is that they can feel and 
think in societies, or all at once. We can only sing 
together perfectly. If we had choral thoughts, 
and choral affections, how much nearer we would 
be to the angels! How the music and thought of 
heaven would stream forth from our private and 
public lives ! 

The division of thoughts into measured lines 
containing the same number of feet, represents the 
unity and harmony of opinion in which the thinkers 
live ; and the termination in rhymes or similar 
sounds, represents the spiritual affinity or likeness 
of their affections. This is the reason why music is 
some heavenly affection struggling for expression in 
our hearts and lives; and why the poet, whose 
choral thoughts and feelings reach out to all his 
race, is the great interpreter of mankind. 

In the spiritual world one society can speak to 
another society, no matter how great their number, 
as readily and fluently as man speaks to man. 
They all feel and think so harmoniously that some 
one spirit speaks for them all ; or, to put it more 
forcibly, they all speak through him as a passive 
medium. 

Evil spirits also can unite for wicked ends, and 
many speak and act through one. This explains 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 95 

the answer given to the Lord, who asked the name 
of the evil spirit controlling the poor maniac : 

"My name is Legion ; for we are many." 

The third method of communicating ideas in the 
spiritual world is by objective means, of which 
writing is the type. 

In the first method, by signs and gestures, the 
soul speaks through the face and the whole body. 
We see a faint shadow of it in the wonderful 
facility with which our educated deaf and dumb 
interchange ideas. In the second method the soul 
speaks through the lungs, involves an idea in a 
sound, and passes it from one to unother. In the 
third it works with the hand or other means, giv- 
ing the thought an ultimate and objective form 
and shape, more or less fixed and permanent, thus 
transmitting it to others without the personal 
presence of the thinker. 

The first method corresponds to the celestial, the 
second to the spiritual, and the third to the natural 
spheres of life and thought, all of which exist or 
may exist in every man, spirit or angel. 

Swedenborg says that communication by writing 
was provided by the Lord for the sake of a written 
Word, dictated by Himself, involving all the mys- 
teries of his Love and Wisdom, to remain for ever 



96 THE OTHER LIFE. 

as the fixed source and centre of life, power and 
thought to the spiritual universe, and by different 
senses, opening out into the different degrees of 
being, accommodated to the highest and lowest 
forms and capacities of his entire creation. 

What a magnificent conception of the nature and 
bearings of the Holy Scripture ! 

Between the vocal speech of spirits and their 
written communications, there is an intermediate or 
pictorial mode of conveying thought, really the 
first step toward writing. By a spiritual process, 
entirely impossible in our physical sphere, the ideas 
or visual images in the mind's eye, are thrown 
outward or made objective in the spiritual atmo- 
spheres, assuming a photographic or rather a stereo- 
scopic distinctness and beauty. 

In this manner every form latent upon the 
canvas of the interior memory, may be re-awak- 
ened to life, and brought out again in apparent 
externeity. Thus every action, event, word and 
thought of our lives can be reproduced and pre- 
sented visibly before us. Spirits by this object- 
ive method can also illustrate and beautify their 
thoughts, so as vastly to enhance the delight and 
instructiveness of their conversations. 

Swedenborg says on this subject : 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 97 

" Once also some spirits discoursed with me by 
nothing but visual representatives, such as flames 
of various colors, luminous appearances, clouds 
ascending and descending, different kinds of small 
houses and stage-scenes, articles of furniture, per- 
sons variously clothed and many other things : all 
of which were representative of spiritual ideas 
from which alone their meaning might be known." 

Sometimes the thoughts or wisdom of angels in 
a superior heaven are let down through the minds 
of those in a lower degree, and presented out- 
wardly to them under these symbolic forms in 
their own spiritual atmospheres. It is thus, indeed, 
that the whole creation is a grand representative 
mirror, a visible symbol of the wisdom and glory 
of God. It Avas thus that John saw in the world 
of spirits, into which his senses had been opened, 
the magnificent panorama of spiritual symbols 
constituting the Apocalypse, and to which Swe- 
denborg has given us the key. 

God has spoken to man through the Book of 
Revelation just as angels speak to each other by 
means of these visual representations. Apocalypse 
means the unveiling of something which is hidden. 
The projection outwardly of something which is 
concealed interiorly, is the same idea in a spiritual 

9 E 



98 THE OTHER LIFE. 

sense. But the Book of Revelation is no revela- 
tion to us without a key to the interpretation of its 
symbols. The meaning of these symbols can only 
be given us through the agency of some human 
mind divinely empowered to teach them. This is 
the secret of Swedenborg's illumination. 

The fact that ideas may be made objectively vis- 
ible in the spiritual atmospheres, is an important 
element in the philosophy of dreaming, of hallu- 
cinations and of many curious mental phenomena. 
It is strikingly illustrated in some of the mesmeric 
or biological experiments. In what is called the 
mesmeric state, the external senses seem to be par- 
tially asleep or paralyzed, while the spiritual senses 
are partially opened. The operator can then make 
the subject see whatever he chooses ; that is, he can 
project the visual images in his own mind by his 
mere will, so that the subject. sees them as external 
things. They can be made to see serpents, houses 
on fire, children drowning, and various terrible 
scenes, — and their intense excitement and involun- 
tary gesticulations show unmistakably that they 
conceive them to be as real as this outer world is to 
our waking perceptions. 

A rude system of drawing and painting arose 
from the attempt to imitate or repeat on parchment 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 99 

or other substance these visual images made upon 
the mind by the objects of nature. This pictorial 
writing preceded the alphabet and books. It cor- 
responds to the pictorial speaking of the spiritual 
world already described. The Aztec artists thus 
informed the Mexican government of the landing 
of the Spaniards, by sending forward rude paint- 
ings of their ships, horses, arms, clothing and 
banners, articles which they had never seen before. 

Our highest products in art, in painting, sculp- 
ture, and architecture, flow from the effort of the 
human mind to make itsjdeas visible. 

By abbreviations, condensations, etc., of this pic- 
torial writing, an alphabet and finally words were 
obtained, representative of things and significative 
of our ideas. In that spiritual language into 
which we shall all consciously come after death, 
every letter, point, iota and little curve, not only 
represents things, states, qualities, and affections, 
but involves mysteries of wisdom incommunicable 
to man whose thought is still limited by the 
shackles of time and space. 

There are writings in heaven not produced by 
the intervention of the hand. These are corre- 
spondences of the thoughts and soon fade away. 
Those written out or printed are permanent, and 



100 THE OTHER LIFE. 

the mechanical work is done with such celerity, 
that Swedenborg says the thoughts apparently 
throw themselves upon paper. 

He saw the books and writings in all the 
heavens. In the celestial spheres a character some- 
what resembling the Hebrew and the Arabic is 
used. In the spiritual spheres it is more like our 
Roman alphabet. The vowels predominate in the 
celestial heavens ; the consonants in the spiritual 
heavens. 

He was not permitted to read these books, but 
only to glance at them, so as to see their general 
structure and character. He gives as a reason, that 
it is against the laws of the divine order for man, 
still living in the natural world, to be instructed by 
spirits or angels. He must derive his spiritual 
light from the Divine Word, and from those who 
are authorized to interpret it. So important is it 
that man should be protected from all the fan- 
tasies, hallucinations, visible images, involuntary 
writing, aerial voices, clairvoyance, and mesmeric 
excitations by which spirits would impose them- 
selves upon him as messengers of divine truth ! 

Whoever doubts that there are books and writ- 
ings in heaven must also doubt the evidence of 
Ezekiel the prophet. 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 101 

He says : 

" Now it came to pass that the heavens were 
opened and I saw visions of God." 

With his spiritual sight thus opened into heaven, 
he describes his wonderful experiences, one of which 
was the following : 

"And when I looked, behold ! a hand was sent 
unto me ; and lo ! a roll of a book was therein ; 

"And he spread it before me ; and it was written 
within and without." 

Some spiritual writings are composed wholly of 
numbers following one after another, like words. 
This seems utterly incomprehensible to the natural 
man ; but such writings convey to those who have 
the key of correspondence, ideas which are wholly 
incommunicable by speech. All the numbers in 
the Bible represent spiritual states and qualities, 
which have been so clearly unfolded by Sweden- 
borg, that one who has been blest with light from 
that source can readily imagine that whole vol- 
umes of spiritual ideas may be conveyed by num- 
bers arranged in certain series and orders. 

In diseased states of the body, when the orderly 
connection and influx of the soul is partially inter- 
rupted, we frequently have the strangest mental 
phenomena, which receive great light from the 



102 THE OTHER LIFE. 

psychology of Swedenborg. I once saw a remark- 
able case which seemed to have some relation to 
the curious fact stated in the foregoing paragraph. 
The patient, who was slowly recovering from an 
apoplectic stroke, was found to have totally lost his 
memory of words. When he began attempting to 
express his ideas, he repeated one number after 
another at considerable length, as if he was using 
words. He evidently thought that he was clothing 
his ideas in the usual and proper manner, for he 
was surprised and indignant that his meaning was 
not comprehended. He continued thus speaking 
in numbers, never, however, in their numerical 
order, for several months. He was probably con- 
nected interiorly with some of those spiritual socie- 
ties which speak and write in numbers. 

There are books and libraries in heaven to which 
all the literary treasures upon earth are absolutely 
insignificant. It is pleasant to think that our most 
charming and ennobling pleasures here are to be 
continued and intensified hereafter. The sons and 
daughters of art will pursue their delightful voca- 
tions for ever. Every book ever written upon 
earth might be reproduced in the spiritual world 
from the imperishable memories of those who have 
read it. Few, if any, of them will attain this 



OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER. 103 

honor. Homer has continued to sing and Cicero 
to speak and Bacon to philosophize and Addison 
to write; but the works which gave them their ter- 
restrial fame are but the scribblings of childhood 
in comparison with the labors of their spiritual 
life, which, will charm the ears and gladden the 
hearts of their angelic friends for ever. 

In view of all these beautiful things, how silly 
and vain is the pride of learning, the pomp of phil- 
osophy and the pretensions of science, with which 
we strut our little hour on the dark stage of this 
earthly life ! 

The apparently gifted, wise and eloquent here are 
not always so hereafter. They are sometimes very 
stupid, and even imbecile. No wisdom remains 
with a man after death, except that which corre- 
sponds to sweet and heavenly affections flowing 
from the love of God and the neighbor. All else 
is evanescent ; mere shadow and fantasy. The 
pure and humble are always wise and brilliant in 
the light of heaven. In that kingdom, the last in 
this world are frequently the first. 



CHAPTER V. 

OTTE STTEEOUNDINGS HEEEAFTEE. 

WITH affections there must be something to 
love ; with ideas and thoughts there must be 
objects to investigate. With a spiritual body, sub- 
stantial and real, there must be ground to stand 
upon; air to breathe; a world to see and feel; 
other spirits to come in contact with ; associations 
and organizations arising from such contact; 
and in fine, an external spiritual universe more 
or less resembling the natural universe we now 
live in. 

Where is this spiritual world? How is it cre- 
ated? What are its laws and its phenomena? 
What stupendous interests revolve around the re- 
plies to these questions ! What light their truthful 
answers would cast upon the great mysteries of life 
and death ! 

How singularly averse is the popular mind, under 
the tuition of the passing dispensation, to think of 
heaven as a real and substantial state of existence. 

104 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 105 

Say that heaven is a state of perpetual prayers and 
praises and ineffable bliss, and you find a ready 
acquiescence; but endeavor to give it a "local hab- 
itation and a name/' to describe it and make it 
credible to our rational faculty, and all ears are 
deaf to us, all eyes are blind. 

The Bible itself is in a measure a dead letter in 
the eyes of a sensual and philosophizing genera- 
tion. The very people who believe it and love it 
and preach it, cannot realize that the Bible shows 
us that angels and departed spirits are living al- 
ready in the human form, seeing, feeling, loving 
and even eating as we do. They forget that the 
prophets and apostles who had glimpses of heaven, 
saw there mountains and rivers and seas and fields 
and temples and cities and animals, and all such 
visible objects as meet our senses here. 

If they say that all these things are symbolical 
and not real, which is equivalent to saying that 
revelation is a kind of dream, what will they 
answer, when we press home to them their own 
professed beliefs, (in which, however, we do not 
concur,) that Enoch and Elijah and the Lord Jesus 
Christ ascended into heaven with their material 
bodies? How can physical bodies, such as they 
had upon earth, exist among the unsubstantial 

E * 



106 THE OTHER LIFE. 

ethers and abstract states of the soul, which con- 
stitute the orthodox heaven ? 

The glorious things of the life to come which 
Paul was only permitted to see and hear, Sweden- 
borg, in the fullness of the Lord's time, has been 
commanded to reveal. Why should Swedenborg 
do more than Paul? Why should Paul have seen 
things which the prophets desired in vain to see ? 
Why should the prophets have discerned the mys- 
teries of God more thoroughly than the patriarchs? 
Because revelation is a progressive work, advan- 
cing slowly from the pearl-white glimmer of its 
dawn to the golden blaze of its perfect day. All 
things are not done at once. The seed first ; after- 
ward the flower; then the fruit ! Abraham, Moses, 
Isaiah, John, Paul, Swedenborg : each had his dis- 
tinct mission, an essential part of the whole, and 
each came or was sent at the right time and in the 
right place. 

Every statement of Swedenborg about the other 
life can be confirmed from the Bible or derived from 
scriptural statements by a process of logical induc- 
tion. It is this which separates him entirely from 
all the spiritualists of modern times. He is pre-emi- 
nently the Christian Seer. His feet are immovably 
planted upon the Word of God. Therefore his 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 107 

naine and his works will grow brighter and brighter 
in the eyes of successive generations, when all the 
false prophets and false Christs, both in the Church 
and out of it, have passed into oblivion. 

The mind of man, unillumined by light from 
heaven, never could have invented the sublime 
philosophy by which the Swedish seer has pene- 
trated so far into the mysterious abysses of the uni- 
verse. The unaided imagination of the natural 
mind, struggling to frame for itself some idea or 
visible image of heaven, rushes to the two extremes, 
materialism and sheer immateriality. Heaven is, 
from one standpoint, a purely mental state of exist- 
ence, a negation of everything real ; God is a Being 
without body, parts, or passions; the soul is a form- 
less and intangible ether ; its life hereafter is one 
of perpetual psalm-singing and oral prayer. 

The mind which entertains this idea of heaven 
is like the earth before the creation, " without 
form and void ;" a chaos, a dark, bewildering abyss. 
It needs the voice of God to speak light into 
existence, so that it may think wisely and ration- 
ally. 

On the other extreme the natural mind falls into 
utter materialism. Heaven is located in some dis- 
tant star or sun, or it occupies 



108 THE OTHER LIFE. 

"The lucid interspace of world and world, 
Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind, 
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, 
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, 
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 
The sacred, everlasting calm." 

If heaven be thus far off in space, they ask 
themselves, how can any living man mount up to 
it ? how can any one return from it ? how can we 
know anything about it ? Very pertinent questions 
if the premise were true. 

Sweden borg affirms that the spiritual world is 
neither material nor immaterial, but substantial ; a 
mediatory form or state of existence between the 
abstract essence of spirit and the concrete forms of 
matter. This is the biblical doctrine, and the great 
Swede, standing faithfully by it, deduces from it a 
system of truth, which throws a new light upon 
science, psychology and theology ; so powerful a 
light, indeed, as to make all things new under its 
magic power. 

The spiritual world is substantial and living. 

The light of the sun, the glory of the clouds, 
the majesty of mountain scenery, the witchery of 
woods and vales, the poetry of waters, and the 
beauties and wonders of the mineral, vegetable and 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 109 

animal kingdoms, exceed in the spiritual world 
anything we have ever seen or felt in this mun- 
dane sphere. And the first impression of the 
newly-risen spirit in the midst of such scenes, is, 
that they are as real as anything left behind him 
on the earth. 

He beholds about him what appears to his senses 
an external and physical world, only etherealized 
and beautified beyond description : 

"An ampler ether, a diviner air, 
And fields invested with purpnreal gleams." 

He wonders into what serene depths of the abysses 
of space he has unconsciously penetrated. He does 
not believe he is dead, or he still waits for his 
winged angels to appear and conduct him to his 
imaginary heaven. 

He has, however, entered a sphere not separated 
from ours by time or space; a sphere not to be 
reached by ascending or descending ; a sphere into 
which the light of nature never penetrates, and 
whose laws and phenomena can never be under- 
stood by a mind in bondage to sensuous appearances. 

And yet this spiritual world, which is so similar 
to ours in externals, originates in an entirely dif- 
ferent manner and is governed by peculiar laws. 
10 



110 THE OTHER LIFE. 

What, then, is the fundamental difference between 
the spiritual world and the world of nature? 

The natural world, or rather the physical uni- 
verse, is fixed and permanent, being the last and 
lowest sphere of the divine emanations. It is 
utterly dead in itself, but is plastic to the inflowing 
and organizing forces of the spiritual sphere. It is, 
therefore, the basis, the footstool, the seed-field, the 
birth-place of all things. The spiritual grows and 
expands within the natural, like the chick within 
the egg, like the butterfly within the worm, until it 
bursts its bonds, and rises to its real and better life. 

The physical cosmos has an externeity independ- 
ent of the souls that live upon it, encased in their 
natural bodies. One sun shines upon all alike. 
The rain descends upon the evil and the good. 
Daylight and darkness come invariably to half the 
world at once. The wilderness does not blossom 
for our prayers ; the flowers do not perish at our 
crimes. Times and spaces, cruel and inexorable as 
death, stand between us and our hopes, our long- 
ings and our loves. 

In the spiritual world it is different. That 
sphere has no externeity independent of the souls 
inhabiting it. That world is momentarily created 
by the influx of the divine life through the spirits 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. Ill 

or angels who live there; and its spiritual forms 
and phenomena represent outwardly in ever-shifting 
panorama the qualities and motions of the soul 
itself. 

Dissect this statement and view the constituent 
ideas separately, for they are the foundation-stones 
of the Swedenborgian philosophy. 

The spiritual world has no externeity inde- 
pendent of the mind. 

It has a transcendently beautiful externeity 
wholly dependent upon the mind. 

That externeity represents the mind; is the 
mind symbolized or mirrored in objective spiritual 
forms. 

Take away the angels and heaven would vanish. 

Take away God and all would vanish ; for 
everything lives, moves and has its being from a 
continuous influx of the divine life. 

The spiritual world is created momentarily and 
changes momentarily by and through the changes 
of affections and thoughts in the inhabitants. It 
changes as the scenery of a dream changes in corre- 
spondence with the changes of state occurring in 
the brain of the dreamer. 

Heaven and hell are, therefore, in the last 
analysis, states of the soul or spirit of man. " The 



112 THE OTHER LIFE. 

kingdom of heaven is within you" is the great spir- 
itual truth announced by the Word of God ; and 
the kingdom of heaven witJiout the spirit corre- 
sponds in its minutest particulars to the kingdom 
of heaven within him. 

"Heaven/' said an old English divine, "is a 
state first and a place afterward." Swedenborg 
shows that the place is created by the state, changes 
instantaneously with it, and is altogether depend- 
ent upon it. 

It seems, at first view, a strange idea that the 
objects surrounding spirits and angels are created 
from moment to moment by the influx of the divine 
creative sphere through the affections and thoughts 
of the inhabitants. That external objects should, 
in some manner, represent or symbolize affections 
and thoughts is credible, and commends itself to 
our aesthetic sense as beautiful and even true. But 
that they are caused or created by affections and 
thoughts, that they appear, change and disappear 
with them, is extraordinary to the mind which still 
thinks from the sensuous appearance of the natural 
life. 

Strange as it seems, however, is it not the sim- 
ple statement of the law by which all creation is 
effected — the law by which the sublime panorama 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 113 

of the universe was projected from the Divine 
Mind? Has not that universe been aptly called 
"the created or unwritten Word/' spoken into 
existence by his will, representing in ultimate and 
concrete forms, by a sacred symbolism, the spirit- 
ual life, the infinite love and wisdom of the Great 
Architect ? Is not the universe the mirror in which 
He repeats his image ? 

The horizon of each spirit or angel embraces the 
little cosmos in which his own image is thus re- 
peated. God creates all the heavens by flowing 
into and through the universal angelic mind as a 
whole. The small part or infinitesimal fraction 
visible to each spirit, is determined by the state of 
his own affections and thoughts, which receive and 
reflect more or less perfectly the divine love and 
the divine wisdom. 

We may never understand it or explain it fur- 
ther; but the ultimate fact remains, that spiritual 
forces flowing from within outward, from above 
downward, from one sphere to another, project or 
make objective a vast, visible, tangible universe, 
corresponding to the invisible, intangible universe 
of affections and thoughts concealed within. 

In what other way did God create the world? 

Is not the universe wrought into forms correspond- 

10 * 



114 THE OTHER LIFE. 

ing to the archetypal images, ideas or patterns ex- 
isting in the Divine Mind ? Is it not reasonable 
that the surroundings of spirits, who are images 
and likenesses of God, should be created in a finite 
manner by the same law which regulates the infi- 
nite operations of the Creator? 

We can see the beautiful shadow of this same 
law even in the actions of our minds upon dead 
matter. What are the changes which civilized 
man has impressed on the face of nature but pro- 
jections of his own will and understanding ? What 
are statues and paintings and songs and the splen- 
dors of architecture, but the inner lives of the 
artists wrought out before us into visible shapes? 

Heaven is so boundless because the varieties of 
good affections and thoughts are infinite. Heaven 
is so sublime and beautiful because the affections 
and thoughts of angels are so pure and holy. 
Heaven is continually growing in majesty, power 
and glory, because the affections and thoughts of its 
inhabitants are ever expanding, and becoming more 
and more receptive of the divine love and the divine 
wisdom. 

Each soul, therefore, is responsible for its heaven 
or its hell. Its own organic structure, its own 
emotional and intellectual states determine where 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 115 

and with whom and how it shall live for ever. 
No arbitrary or judicial decree lifts it to heaven or 
dooms it to hell. We determine the final forms of 
our inner universe of affection and thought by our 
own life and conduct upon earth, and those forms 
of our spiritual nature determine our external sur- 
roundings to eternity. 

We have already seen how the character of the 
spirit gives beauty or deformity to the spiritual 
body, perfection or imperfection, pleasure or pain 
to the spiritual senses. The intelligence of the 
spirit determines what clothing the spiritual body 
is to wear. 

Clothing in heaven ? Why not ? 

Is it not said of the angel who rolled away the 
stone from the sepulchre, "and his raiment was 
white as snow ?" 

Did not the women who entered the sepulchre 
see an angel who was "clothed in a long white 
garment ? ,? And the seer of Patmos tells us that, 
when a door was opened to him in heaven, he saw 
on one occasion "seven angels" coming out of the 
temple, " clothed in pure white linen, and having 
their breasts girded with golden girdles." Rev.xv. 6. 

Let infidels and rationalists sneer at the state- 
ment that we have bodies and clothing and houses 



116 THE OTHER LIFE. 

in heaven. The Christian expects to live in a spir- 
itual body in which he will no longer see darkly, 
but face to face; he hopes to be clad with the 
saints in fine linen and purple ; he believes he will 
be given one of those mansions of which there are 
so many in his Father's house. 

As the garments of the angels correspond to their 
spiritual states, they change or are changed accord- 
ing to these states. They are of different styles 
and colors according to the rank and office of the 
wearers. They are opaque or dull, or bright or 
flaming in splendor, each and all in turn according 
to the variations of their affections and thoughts. 

These garments are not made with hands. They 
are given by the Lord, from day to day, from mo- 
ment to moment. They come to the angels as the 
leaves come to the tree, as the colors come to the 
cloud. Our spiritual bodies are arrayed in beauty 
and glory, like the lilies of the field, without toil, 
without spinning, even without our thought. 

The houses in the spiritual world are not built 
by manual labor, but rise 

" Like golden exhalations of the dawn," 

in obedience and in correspondence to the outflow- 
ing spiritual life of those who dwell in them. 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 117 

Hear what Swedenborg reports : 

" I have been with the angels in their habita- 
tions. They are exactly like our houses upon 
earth, but more beautiful. They contain cham- 
bers, drawing-rooms and bed-rooms in great num- 
bers. They have courts, and are encompassed by 
gardens, flower-beds and fields." 

" Where the angels live in societies, the habita- 
tions are contiguous, and arranged in the form of a 
city, with courts, streets, and squares exactly like 
the cities on our earth. It has also been granted 
me to walk through them and to iook about on all 
sides. This occurred to me when wide awake, my 
interior sight being open at the time." 

" I have seen palaces in heaven so magnificent as 
to surpass all description. Some were more splen- 
did than others. The inside was in keeping with 
the outside. The apartments were ornamented 
with such decorations, that no language is adequate 
to the description of them." 

Heavenly affections, wise thoughts and good 
deeds are the materials which determine the con- 
struction of these eternal homes. We are every 
day by our life here contributing something to our 
surroundings hereafter. Not only are our ciothing 
and houses thus created, but the scenery about us ; 



118 THE OTHER LIFE. * 

the sun in our sky, the clouds over our heads ; the 
mountains or vales afar off; the forest with its 
green mantle; the river with its silver ripple. 
Our affections bring the vernal airs about us ; our 
wisdom floods the atmosphere with light ; our love 
of God kindles the sun ; our love of the neighbor 
peoples our spheres with paradises and splendors ; 
the spiritual truths in our own minds build our 
houses of precious stones, make the meadows green, 
and the stars visible, and the winds musical : 

"And every thought. breaks forth a rose." 

If each spirit creates or determines its own ob- 
jective world around it, will there not be an endless 
confusion of forms and images, of sounds and 
colors ? indeed, a perfect chaos ? 

Such, doubtless, would be the case, were it not 
for the laws of spiritual affinity by which the 
heavenly societies are organized. Spiritual affin- 
ities determine presence or absence in the other 
life. By the operation of this great force, the 
good and evil are separated after death. By its 
still further operation the good are distinguished 
into different orders and classes. Similar states of 
affection and thought attract each other, and they 
project or make visible similar representative ob- 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 119 

jects. What results ? Spirits who resemble each 
other interiorly find themselves in what we, in the 
natural sphere, would call the same world, the 
same country, the same place. 

Individual differences between spirits in the 
same society (and no two spirits were ever created 
exactly alike) may determine that one spirit lives 
in one house and another in a different one ; that 
oue resides by a river and another on a hill-top ; 
that one is clad in silk and another in purple ; that 
one is a prince and another a doorkeeper ; and so 
on with infinite variety. 

These diversities are individual and special ; the 
points of agreement are general. All the spirits in 
a given society are held together by some ruling 
love; some similar relationship to the Lord and 
the neighbor ; some subtile and powerful bond of 
common faith and thought ; some consentaneous 
desire and capacity for specific uses. This funda- 
mental unity or brotherhood of thought and affec- 
tion causes them to have similar surroundings, 
similar scenery ; the same sun shining before their 
faces, the same mountains towering afar, the same 
sea gleaming in the distance, the same city, the 
same temples, the same civil goverment and similar 
manners and customs. There is thus a certain 



120 THE OTHER LIFE. 

fixity and permanence in general, within the bounds 
or limits of which there is a charming and ever- 
varying fluctuation of particulars. 

We see at once that society in heaven has no 
geographic or national basis. A society of angels 
is only a larger man, consisting of similar units 
bound together like the organs of the human body 
by loving sympathies, each doing the work for 
which he is structurally fitted, and each finding his 
own life by expending it for all the rest. Many 
societies, great and small, are again held together 
by larger bonds and sympathies and grander uses, 
and constitute a still greater man. Finally, all the 
heavens are so organically connected, that they 
appear to the Lord as a single man. Heaven, says 
Swedenborg, is the maximus Homo — the Grand 
Man. 

His doctrine of the Grand Man, with all its 
complexities and mysteries, is based upon the tran- 
scendent fact, that the universe was created by a 
Divine Man, in his own image and likeness; and 
all its discrete degrees, spiritual and natural, are 
woven and held together by influx and correspond- 
ence through the mediation of the Human Form. 
The subject is too vast and difficult for even a 
partial elucidation in this little volume. 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 121 

The societies of each heaven are innumerable. 
All the members of one society have some general 
resemblance, like the facial and other resemblances 
which we here detect in families and races. They 
all know and love each other intimately with the 
tenderest sense of kinship. In the other life, in- 
deed, all who are not in similar and corresponding 
states of thought and affection are, or become 
strangers to each other, live in distant societies, or 
even in other heavens. 

For there are more heavens than one. The 
Greek of the Lord's Prayer should have been 
translated : " Our Father who art in the heavens. 7 ' 
Paul says that he was carried up to the third 
heaven. Swedenborg affirms that there are three 
heavens, distinct from each other, one above or 
within the other, communicating not by spaces or 
sensible approaches, but only by influx, like that 
of the soul into the body. 

As all external appearances in the spiritual 
world are due to differences of affection and 
thought, the division of the entire heaven or 
Grand Man into three distinct, discrete, spiritual 
universes, is founded upon a threefold manifesta- 
tion of the divine love and wisdom through the 

natural, spiritual and celestial degrees of angelic 
11 F 



122 THE OTHER LIFE. 

life. The three heavens differ in their degrees of 
love and wisdom, in their modes of thought, in 
their organizations, their uses, their clothing, their 
houses, their external scenery and surroundings; 
each higher degree being more perfect, beautiful 
and glorious than those beneath it. 

And we, poor denizens of earth, live far below 
them all ! If we turn from the guiding light of 
revelation and question the cold and beautiful 
Nature before us about the life after death and the 
heaven for which we yearn, we are answered only 
by the blinding glare of the sun, the murmur of 
the sea, the wail of the wind, the birth and death 
of the flowers, the shifting colors of the cloud, the 
blue dome with its unrevealing face and the far-off 
smile of the silent stars ! 

Immersed in our sensual and corporeal states ; 
limited in thought and perception by the barriers 
of time and space ; scarcely developed in our most 
advanced condition to a rational grasp of spiritual 
things ; unable to form more than a vague and 
pleasing idea of the heaven nearest to our earth; 
the spiritual and celestial states of thought and 
affection are almost incomprehensible to our souls ; 
and our ideas of the worlds produced by them as 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 123 

transcendent mirrors of their being, are like music 
which can never be translated into words. 

Yet even the loftiest celestial height is attainable 
by men who were born in the moral darkness and 
gloom of a world so wicked ; that the Divine Man 
had to visit it in the flesh to redeem it from the 
power of hell. 

Man is a microcosm, an epitome of the entire 
universe, a miniature heaven, because he was cre- 
ated in the image and likeness of God. We have 
rational, natural, spiritual and celestial degrees of 
life folded away in potency behind and within the 
flesh and blood of this corporeal life. These de- 
grees are shut at birth, and are gradually opened 
by instruction, discipline, experience ; by the devel- 
opment of the rational principle, by temptations, by 
a life according to the commandments; by the recep- 
tion of love and wisdom from the Lord. 

Man's moral state at death, his ruling love, the 
possibility of putting away for ever the evil, and 
of developing the good things of his nature ;• these 
determine what spiritual sphere he will go to, what 
society he will live in, what position he will hold, 
and what surroundings he will have. 

All these things are foreseen by the Lord alone. 
His eternal providence watches over us, to lead us 



124 THE OTHER LIFE. 

by ways we know Dot, from the cold and darkness 
of our sensual life to the light and warmth, the 
beauty and peace of the celestial country. 

There is a great difference between spiritual 
thought and natural thought. Spiritual thought 
is not merely thinking about spiritual things, but 
thinking about all things in a spiritual manner. 

If the angels thought about their external world 
as we do of ours ; if there were fixed times and 
spaces there as here; if they studied the objects 
around them in our sensuous manner, and viewed 
them as something independent of their own spirit- 
ual states ; then indeed the heaven of Swedenborg 
would be little better than a physical globe purified 
and etherealized ; such a heaven as the current 
theology expects when the dead bodies are raised 
and made incorruptible, and the earth is prepared 
by fire for the final habitation of the saints ! 

But the angels do not survey their surrounding 
phenomena as we do ours. They do not think of 
the objects about them as something separate from 
them and independent of them ; as something to be 
studied by observation and experiment and induc- 
tion, the processes by which our natural sciences 
are constructed on the evidence of our senses. 
That would be to think naturally as we do, and 



OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER. 125 

not spiritually as the angel is obliged to think by 
the very laws of his being. 

How then does he think spiritually? 

That beautiful and glorious nature which seems 
to surround him, is a glowing mirror of his own 
affections and thoughts and those of the angels 
associated with him. It is an open book to him, 
whose every object is a word, every movement a 
sentence, conveying to his mind some spiritual or 
celestial idea. He does not think of the objects 
before him any more than we think of the paper, 
ink, letters and marks of punctuation, when we 
are reveling with delight over the pages of some 
favorite author. 

Sweden borg says : 

" Such is the architecture of heaven that you 
would say you there beheld the very art itself; and 
no wonder, for it is from heaven that that art is 
derived to men on earth. The angels said that 
such objects as have been mentioned, and innumer- 
able others still more perfect, are presented before 
their eyes by the Lord ; but that nevertheless they 
impart more pleasure to their minds than to their 
eyes, because in every particular they discern cor- 
respondences, and through those correspondences 

things divine." 

11 • 



126 THE OTHER LIFE. 

Yes, the external world of the spirit is a vast 
series of symbolisms, which reveal to his perceptive 
faculties the infinite treasures of spiritual truth 
and the infinite miracles of spiritual love. Noth- 
ing comes to him from without, although it seems 
to do so, but all from within. 

The God within him reveals himself outwardly 
to him as a Sun. He feels the divine wisdom in 
the light which surrounds him, and the divine love 
in the sweet warmth of his celestial air. The 
winds and the clouds denote to his eye the move- 
ments in the spheres above him. He draws from 
his evening stars a spiritual light that emanates 
from the innumerable societies of heaven. All 
things are alive to him and commune with him. 
All things breathe upon him wisdom and love. 
The forests, the gardens, the flowers, the waters, 
the mountains, the sea, are voices that speak, and 
faces that smile, and hands that beckon, and music 
that gladdens, and thoughts that illumine, and 
hearts that beat in unison with his own. 



CHAPTER VI. 

SPIKITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 

THE practical man, disgusted with metaphysical 
subtleties, turns impatiently away at the men- 
tion of time and space. Let him give us his ear. 
He will find much that is novel, beautiful and 
instructive in Swedenborg's presentation of these 
subjects. Swedenborg is not altogether free from 
mystery and obscurity. How could it be otherwise, 
when he deals with infinite themes and struggles to 
convey spiritual truths to natural minds? He has, 
however, delivered us from so many errors, dissi- 
pated so many clouds before us, led us to such 
clear and commanding heights, that we can trust- 
ingly follow him on the most difficult paths, as- 
sured that if we do not understand him, the fault 
will lie mainly in the feebleness and darkness of 
our own minds. 

Some will say these things are very strange ! as 
if the strange and new were necessarily impossible ! 
Do you suppose that heaven can be. opened to you, 

127 



128 THE OTHER LIFE. 

and the laws and phenomena of the other life 
revealed, and that you will not be startled by any- 
thing strange or new ? Is it not far more rational 
to suppose that everything will be novel and sur- 
prising and wonderful ? Study Swedenborg pa- 
tiently, ponder in your heart what seems doubtful 
or mystical, accustom your mental eyes to the great 
splendor of the light he gives, which almost blinds 
you at first, and you will gradually discover more 
spiritual truth in his pages than is contained in all 
the libraries of the world. 

After all his glowing descriptions of our spiritual 
bodies, our spiritual senses, our surroundings and 
organizations hereafter, what are we to make of his 
assertion that there is neither space nor time in the 
spiritual world ? 

Sjmce with us is the very basis of our identity, 
and of the differentiation of one thing from an- 
other. Impenetrability, or the power of a body to 
occupy a certain portion of space to the exclusion 
of all others, is the fundamental physical property, 
without which nothing could exist. Nor can we 
imagine how events can succeed each other in 
regular order without originating the idea of 
time. 

It is true that our thought and imagination leap 



SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 129 

over spaces and times without difficulty. Our 
heart is where our home is, though it be far away. 
The case of the young lady who at a London ball 
clasped her hands to her bosom in fearful agony at 
the very moment her lover was .shot through the 
heart in Spain, and many similar cases, prove that 
sympathetic spirits are not really sundered, although 
their bodies may be, by the spaces of the material 
world. 

It is true also that we make a certain mental 
estimate of time, whether it be long or short, ac- 
cording to our mental states — an estimate not at all 
concurred in by our neighbor who gets his informa- 
tion from the time-piece or the movement of the 
sun. And lastly, in our dreams, when the soul 
works in partial independence of the body, what a 
magnificent scorn she exhibits of the bondage of 
time and space and even of death itself! 

These are faint foreshado wings of the spiritual 
laws revealed through Swedenborg. 

Times and spaces are fixities in this life; they 
are appearances in the next. 

What are appearances ? 

They are objects or events or motions or times 
or spaces which represent the changing states of 
the soul as to wisdom and love. They appear or 



130 THE OTHER LIFE. 

disappear with these mental states, changing as 
they change. 

Time and space are no exceptions to the law of 
spiritual creation that the objective world is pro- 
duced by and represents the subjective. A spirit's 
body changes, his clothing changes, his house 
changes, his scenery changes, according to the 
changes of his mental state. Variations in time 
and space are with him the external signs and 
proofs of variations in his emotional and intel- 
lectual condition. They are modes of his own 
existence. 

It is day or night to the spirit, cold or warm, 
summer or winter, not according to the relation- 
ships existing between a rotating earth and a cen- 
tral sun, but according to the state of the soul or 
frame of the mind, and a greater or less receptivity 
of the love and wisdom which are the heat and 
light of the spiritual world. That love and wis- 
dom enter the mind by an interior way, and are 
made apparent to the perceptive faculties as heat 
or light in the external sphere. 

So also objects are near or far off in that world, 
not on account of fixed spatial distances, but 
through the operation of the law of affinity which 



SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 131 

draws similar tilings together and drives dissimilar 
ones apart. 

Swedenborg's statement, then, that there are no 
times and spaces in the spiritual world, is qualified 
by the statement, that they are not fixed times and 
spaces, such as we have here, but apparent times 
and spaces wholly different in origin and in signifi- 
cation from ours. 

Time and space come with a finite creation. 
The moment souls are created, finited, placed apart 
from God and exist, time and space spring up 
about them. Why ? Because they are finite. If 
any one of them were infinite, he would be God, 
without time and space. Man is finite; he feels 
limitations. He reaches forward ; he collides with 
another finite. He looks abroad ; he is met by the 
horizon. 

The horizon has a deep significance. It is the 
badge, the type, the proof of our finiteness. It 
contracts or expands indefinitely according to our 
spiritual states. We can never get out of it. It 
is the periphery of our universe. There is no 
horizon, however, to the eye of God. 

The fact that there are times and spaces in this 
world and apparent times and spaces in the next, 
is evidence of our finiteness, is proof that we are 



132 THE OTHER LIFE. 

separated or discreted from God. He has no time, 
no space, no limitations, no progressions from one 
place to another, from one age to another, from one 
state of thought and affection to another, from one 
life to another. 

His infinite love and wisdom, being above times 
and spaces and phenomena, have an infinite projec- 
tion or extension. He therefore pervades every 
sphere without a horizon in any. He is therefore 
omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. 

The universe exists only by reason of its imper- 
fection. It may grow more and more perfect for 
ever, but the absolutely perfect is unattainable, 
because it is the divine. 

Now contemplate the two most profound and 
comprehensive laws of the spiritual world. 

1st. The imperfect reception of the divine love 
in the will of the angels, and the infinite varieties 
of that reception, are the causes of all spatial ap- 
pearances with their objects and phenomena. 

2d. The imperfect reception of the divine wis- 
dom in the understanding of the angels is the 
cause of the appearance of time and its suc- 
cession. 

These laws are evident; for if any soul were 
perfect in its reception of the divine love it would 



SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 133 

enter into or assume all the creative energies of 
God, and could pervade all epochs. If it were 
perfect in the reception of the divine wisdom, it 
would see the past, the present and the future as 
one. 

Our imperfection is the pledge of our immortal- 
ity, our progress, our happiness, as well as the 
ground of our consciousness itself. 

The poet understood all this, who said : 

"Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb, 
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him ?" 

There is spiritual as well as physical impenetra- 
bility. It is our individuality, our identity. Each 
soul is a substance with specific qualities peculiarly 
its own, not to be displaced by any other soul or 
transmuted into it. Therefore it produces times 
and spaces peculiar to itself. 

All things differ. No two trees are alike; no 
two leaves on a tree. No forms are ever precisely 
similar ; no two thoughts ; no two affections ; no 
two human faces; no two spirits. Hence the in- 
finity of the spiritual and natural universes, and 
the boundlessness of times and spaces both here 
and hereafter. 

As all things differ, every state of affection and 
12 



134 THE OTHER LIFE. 

thought must have points of divergence from all 
other states, giving birth to some surroundings 
peculiar to itself. Therefore separations take place. 
Each thing has an individual sphere; each stand- 
point a different horizon. One thing stands apart 
from another in space ; one thing succeeds another 
in time. 

On earth and in heaven the appearances are the 
same. Similar impressions of time and space are 
made on the senses of man and angel, but the inter- 
pretation is different. This arises from the differ- 
ence between natural and spiritual thought. Spir- 
itual thought looks directly into the causes of 
things. It sees the origin of spiritual times and 
spaces, and sees that it is mental. The angel, 
therefore, is not surprised at the annihilation of his 
space, at the shortening or lengthening of his time, 
events which on our earth would be incredibly 
miraculous. 

He thinks intently from love of some friend in 
the remotest spiritual society, and space is nothing ; 
and he stands face to face with his friend. He 
has entered into a similar state of affection and 
thought, and therefore projects similar things 
around him. Nor is he astonished if any one van- 
ishes instantly from his sight. He knows that he 



SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 135 

has simply passed into a different frame of mind. 
So of time. The sun may be shining in noon-day 
brilliance, but if the spirit sinks into a selfish or 
worldly state of thought, it will grow immediately 
dark and the sun will disappear. States shorten 
or lengthen the days. 

From this point of view, we may understand 
that strange passage of Scripture, in which it is 
asserted that Joshua made the sun stand still in the 
midst of heaven, so that it hasted not to go down 
for a whole day. The skeptic mocks at this state- 
ment, and the Christian doubts it or is sorely puz- 
zled to explain it. No one in this scientific age 
dares suppose that either the earth or the sun could 
stand still for a moment without precipitating the 
globe to destruction. The commentators have no 
refuge but to say with some, that it is " a sublime 
poetical trope ;" or, with others, that God caused a 
great refraction of light in the sky long after the 
sun had gone down, enabling the Israelites to pur- 
sue their enemies — which, of course, is a paltry 
subterfuge. 

All persons and events in the Jewish history 
represented spiritual things, the mysteries of heaven, 
the operation of God on the heart. In this fact lies 
the divinity of the Old Testament. The miracles 



136 THE OTHER LIFE. 

are simply spiritual events interpreted in a natural 
manner. The sun shines in heaven for a longer or 
shorter period according to the states of the indi- 
vidual angel. To have the sun stand still until one 
slays his enemies, is, in spiritual language, to have 
the divine support and countenance in overcoming 
our evils, so long as we continue the warfare against 
them in his name. 

The Jews were, no doubt, assisted by a miracu- 
lous light, but it came from within and not from 
without ; from the spiritual Sun, not from the nat- 
ural. The light that smote Paul on his way to 
Damascus did not flash from our terrestrial sky. 
Yet the phenomena in these cases were interpreted 
sensuously by Paul and Joshua; and the natural 
inference is, that they occurred in the physical 
sphere. This is one of the many instances where 
the letter killeth, and the spirit maketh alive. 

Let us return to spiritual spaces. 

When an angel sees another spirit close by, he 
knows that that spirit has something in common 
with himself, has entered into a state of life, 
thought and feeling similar to his own. When he 
sees spirits afar off unable to approach, he knows 
that no physical obstacles intervene, but that their 
dissimilar spiritual states keep them asunder. 



SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 137 

Thus it was that the rich man saw Lazarus 
" afar off/' in Abraham's bosom — that is, in a state 
of love to God and the neighbor incomprehensible 
to himself. This total difference of state is the 
"impassable gulf" which is fixed between heaven 
and hell — no material abyss, but a dissimilarity of 
mental states which produces entirely different 
worlds around them. Thus the angels and the 
devils are antipodal, standing feet to feet, each 
utterly and for ever beyond the horizon of the 
other, because their states of thought and feeling 
are fundamentally and eternally opposite. 

Persons or societies in the spiritual world are 
more or less remote from each other according to 
the dissimilarity of their mental states. They 
approach or recede as these states vary and become 
more or less sympathetic. Husband and wife, 
being thoroughly united in spirit, occupy the same 
house and the same chamber. The spirit next res- 
ident to yourself will be the one more thoroughly 
congenial, and so on in all directions from yourself 
as a centre. 

Swedenborg says : 

" It has been permitted me to see how similitude 
of state conjoins, and thereby contracts the exten- 
sion of space or distance, and how dissimilitude 

12 * 



138 THE OTHER LIFE. 

separates and produces an extension of space or 
distance. They whom the sight would judge to 
be a mile distant from each other, can be present 
in a moment when the love of one toward another 
is excited ; and on the contrary, they who are con- 
versing: together can in a moment be removed a 
mile apart when enmity is excited." 

In passing from one extreme state to another, 
from intense joy to intense grief, from great light 
to utter darkness, from faith to incredulity, from 
love to hatred, and so forth, the soul travels 
through a great many intermediate states, which, 
if they were all registered and presented to out- 
ward view, would almost give one a panorama of 
the spiritual universe. 

How do they move about or travel in the spirit- 
ual world ? 

To advance from one person to another, from 
one society to another, from one kingdom or 
heaven to another, interior changes of state must 
occur in the mind, w T hich changes are accompanied 
by corresponding progressions of the spiritual body 
in the apparent space of the spiritual world. 

It is therefore possible for the spirit to remain in 
the same place in fact, and, by successive changes 
of state induced upon his affections and thoughts 



SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 139 

by spirits approaching one after another, to travel 
in appearance from place to place, from society to 
society, from heaven to heaven. 

This organic law of the spirit renders credible 
the statement that Swedenborg was granted a sur- 
.vey of all parts of the spiritual world while still 
living in his natural body. His soul did not leave 
his body. His natural senses became quiescent; 
his natural mode of thought became dormant. 
His spiritual perceptions were opened ; he entered 
into the sphere or states of the spirits or angels 
who approached him ; and he saw around him the 
scenery or events which represented outwardly their 
spiritual lives. By having different spirits success- 
ively adjoined to him, his apparent external sur- 
roundings were successively changed, and he thus 
obtained that vast accumulation of spiritual expe- 
riences which will instruct and delight the coming 
generations of men. 

To illustrate most forcibly this great law, that 
spiritual scenery, with all its objects, times and 
spaces, rises spontaneously about the unmoving 
spirit in correspondence with his successive changes 
of affection and thought ; and also to show how 
the natural and spiritual worlds are connected ; the 
spirit of Swedenborg, still resident in his natural 



140 THE OTHER LIFE. 

body, was presented with a view of spirits from 
several planets of our solar system, and from 
worlds that revolve afar off in the sidereal abysses, 
and through them he saw the people and objects in 
those remote spheres. 

Thus his little book, " Earths in the Universe," 
upon which the greatest ridicule has been heaped, 
and which is perhaps the most difficult fully to 
comprehend, is explained by, and in return itself 
illustrates the fundamental laws of our spiritual 
being. 

In the spiritual world nothing ever separates us 
from those we love and by whom we are loved ; for 
to think of one there intently from affection, is to 
bring him before our face. Affection is presence 
and thought is sight. God is, therefore, for ever 
shining as a sun before the faces of his children. 

Another of the wonders of the spiritual life is 
that the sun is always in the east, and that the 
angels can never turn their backs upon it. Which- 
ever way they turn their bodies the sun is always 
in front of them. This fact, apparently so strange, 
is only a part of the general law, that all objects 
which appear outwardly to spirits are represent- 
ative of spiritual things within themselves. The 
sun without them represents the Lord as he is 



SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 141 

received in their inmost hearts. Their affections, 



the interior faces of the spirit are perpetually 
turned toward the Lord, and therefore the repre- 
sentative sun appears perpetually before the face 
of the body. On the contrary the sun of the spir- 
itual world is always at the back of evil spirits. 
They do not see it because they are interiorly 
turned away from the Lord. 

Morning, noon and evening come and go, not 
according to the rising and setting of the sun, for 
the sun of the spiritual world appears always at a 
middle altitude between the horizon and the 
zenith ; but in obedience to the mutations of the 
spirit itself in its reception of the divine love and 
wisdom. It is morning when the Lord rises 
freshly and sweetly upon the heart with his mar- 
ried beams of goodness and truth. The light 
which illumines the world, illumines also with liv- 
ing radiance of thought the soul that surveys it. 
The celestial love accompanying this morning light 
stirs warmly the most secret fountains of the emo- 
tional life. The morning hour of the angels is 
their state of sweetest peace, innocence, trust and 

Every morning in the spiritual world is a new 
birth and resurrection ; a passing away of old 



142 THE OTHER LIFE. 

forms of thought and feeling and a flowering forth 
of a higher and better state. Every morning is a 
further revelation of the Lord, and a fresh corona- 
tion of love, fragrant with dews and flowers, as the 
guiding divinity of the soul. 

The love of the Lord newly awakened into 
higher power stimulates the love of the neighbor, 
and the soul yearns to go forth, vigorous and joy- 
ful, into all the uses of life, social, civil and do- 
mestic. Then it passes on to its noon state, when 
the blended heat and light are greatest, and the 
spiritual activities are at their height. It pours 
out its life in genial labors. 

But in the attempt to utilize the love and wis- 
dom given it of God for the benefit of others, some- 
thing of the selfhood creeps in, and the light begins 
to pale and the heat to decline, and the shadows of* 
evening steal gradually over the soul. The morn- 
ing and noon are long and brilliant according as 
the spirit can sustain its total surrender to God and 
the neighbor. As the soul turns partially away 
from the Lord to self, and approaches, though still 
remotely, those earthly states or modes of feeling 
and thought which we so well understand, a spirit- 
ual obscurity overshadows it, represented outwardly 
by all the phenomena of evening. 



SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 143 

Thus it is that even the angels feel, like ourselves, 
the tender pensiveness of the twilight hour. The 
great sun seems to veil himself in a glory of amber 
clouds. The "silver stars steal softly forth and light 
their humbler fires. Mysterious and beautiful 
shadows of heaven spread over the woods and 
waters. The echoes of purer loves and of nobler 
thoughts tremble on the air. And the golden 
depths of ether draw the soul into delicious reverie, 
with a beauty that saddens while it exalts, and with 
a divine intimation that the splendors of its morn- 
ing hour are concealed but not lost. 

But there is no night in heaven. That belongs 
only to the earth and to hell. For the angels never 
fall into states of thought and feeling so low, that 
they could forget or deny the Lord — never! 

Lastly, they sleep. 

Yes, they sleep and dream. They drop the 
activities of angelic life; they relax the high ten- 
sions of love and thought. They rest. They are 
blest with visions of transcendent beauty. Their 
dreams are the voices of higher angels talking 
above them on celestial themes. In the highest 
heaven it is the voice of Jehovah walking and 
speaking with his children in the paradise of the 
soul. In the deep slumber and unconsciousness of 



144 THE OTHER LIFE. 

their selfhood, they are thus secretly fed with new 
life from above. They are drawn back to the 
Lord. Then comes the heavenly dawn again with 
its glimmer of pearl and gold. The joy and peace 
of a new and more innocent childhood burst upon 
them. They sing praises which are prayers, and 
they turn toward each other with that love which 
is both praise and prayer. Then the sun opens his 
palace-gates of cloud, and, renovated by his warmth 
and light, they consecrate themselves to the duties 
and blessings of another day. 

Swedenborg says that the angels advance in per- 
fection by means of these successive and charming 
alternations of state. We are apt to suppose that 
the angelic life will be one continued, unabated 
blaze of glory, and a steady advance from height to 
height, with never a look cast downward or back- 
ward. Swedenborg's disclosure is far more rational 
and beautiful, and founded, moreover, in the nature 
of things. 

For there is an eternal and universal alternation 
and revolution impressed on spirit and matter ; an 
attraction and repulsion ; a going and returning ; a 
rising and setting ; systole and diastole ; inspiration 
and expiration ; contraction and expansion ; light 



SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES. 145 

and shadow; heat and cold; day and night; 
sleeping and waking ; summer and winter. 

This eternal and universal alternation of states, 
the perpetual outflowing and indrawing of the 
breath of God, is the mighty force which keeps the 
orbs of heaven on their courses, turns the world on 
its axis, makes the ebb and flow of the tides, brings 
us June and December ; causes the heart to beat and 
the lungs to breathe, excites and subdues the powers 
of the brain, impels us to labor and to rest, lifts us 
to heaven and permits us to recede to the earth. 

Amid all the infinite variety of phenomena and 
the multiplicity of secondary causes, the one pri- 
mary universal cause of all these things is, the 
tendency of the self hood, on the one hand, to recede 
from the Lord, and the attractive power of the 
divine love, on the other, which would draw all 
things back to the infinite bosom. 

This apparent resolution or disintegration of the 
one great cause into the many, was in the mind of 
the far-sighted poet when he sang : 

"All things 
Are of one pattern made ; bird, beast and flower, 
Song, picture, form, space, thought and character 
Deceive us, seeming to be many things, 
And are but one." 
13 G 



146 THE OTHER LIFE. 

Swedenborg frequently states that it is the ina- 
bility of the natural man to think above time and 
space, or, in other words, his bondage to sensuous 
appearances, which causes his mental darkness, and 
compels him to construe the Word of God in a 
literal manner, against which the educated reason 
must finally revolt. 

The Word of God is an imperishable record of 
the states of the human heart and intellect in their 
relations to the Supreme Being. These states can- 
not be comprehended by the mind which rests in 
the contemplation of the times, places, numbers and 
persons mentioned in the Bible. Those times, 
places, numbers and persons are representative of 
spiritual states, and nothing but a knowledge of 
those states can lead us to a true perception of the 
spiritual things of the Lord's kingdom. 

To prepare the way for the comprehension of the 
spiritual sense, which he was commissioned to un- 
fold, Swedenborg reveals to us the laws and phe- 
nomena of the other life, enabling us, in a great 
measure, to think spiritually and above nature; 
involving, also, a positive philosophy of the human 
soul which must supersede the dreamy metaphysics 
of all the ancient and modern schools. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 

110 be with Christ ! to see the Lord ! to diminish 
- the sad distance which now seems to intervene 
between Him and our souls, is the highest, deepest, 
sweetest hope of the Christian heart. 

Behold how this sacred hope is created and 
nourished by the melodious utterances of the Holy 
Word. 

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall 
see God." 

"In thy presence is fullness of joy; at thy right 
hand are pleasures for evermore." 

" Behold ! the tabernacle of God is with men, 
and He will dwell with them, and they shall be 
his people ; and God Himself shall be with them 
and be their God." 

" Whom have I in heaven but Thee ?" 

"My Father will love him, and we will come 
unto him, and make our abode with him." 

147 



148 THE OTHER LIFE. 

" My presence shall go with thee, and I will give 
thee rest." 

" My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God : 
when shall I come and appear before God ?" 

Swedenborg, the herald of the New Jerusalem 
descending from heaven ; he who by divine author- 
ity has unsealed the Word of God and opened it 
to our spiritual perceptions ; he who has seen into 
the world of spirits, into heaven and hell and into 
the mechanism of the universe ; what does he 
report to our hungry and thirsty souls about this 
great mystery, the presence of the Lord in the 
world we are to inhabit hereafter? 

Strange are his utterances at the first inspection, 
and many a mind has turned away, no doubt, from 
his pearls of priceless wisdom and beauty, which it 
needed but a little patience and reflection to dis- 
cover. 

" The Lord is the all in all in heaven." 

" The Divine Sphere of the Lord constitutes 
heaven." 

"The Divine Sphere of the Lord in heaven is 
love to Him and charity to the neighbor." 

"The angels taken collectively are called Heaven, 
because they compose it." 

" In proportion as the angels receive goodness 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 149 

and truth from the Lord, so far are they angels and 
so far are they heaven." 

The angels are heaven ! Heaven, then, is not a 
world or place created by the Lord out of nothing 
as a home for the angels? nor a place into which 
one may possibly be admitted as through the gates 
of a city? No! Heaven considered as an ob- 
jective scene of supernal grandeur and beauty, is 
created instantaneously, from moment to moment, 
not only for the angels but through the angels. It is 
a cosmos representative of angelic states of thought 
and affection, springs up with them, changes with 
them, and would instantly vanish like a dream, if 
the angels could be withdrawn. On the other hand 
every soul added to heaven increases its glory and 
splendor and bliss, adds something organically to it 
which did not exist there until its arrival. 

Now, notice particularly. It is the Lord in the 
angels which is heaven. Out of the angels, above 
the angels, He is infinite, invisible, incomprehen- 
sible. In and through the angels He creates 
heaven. The Lord is the all in all in heaven, 
not by the transfusion of his divine substance into 
the angels, but by his divine sphere. His divine 
sphere is not Himself, but an emanation of divine 
love and wisdom from Himself. It is this divine 

13 * 



150 THE OTHER LIFE. 

sphere received by the angels which is called the 
Lord in the angels. There are different heavens 
and myriads of different societies with their infi- 
nitely different forms and surroundings, all pro- 
duced by the different modes and degrees of receiv- 
ing and manifesting the divine sphere which is the 
life of heaven. 

The angel himself contributes nothing either in 
spirit or substance to the creation. His own body 
is a form organized out of spiritual substances, 
which are emanations from the divine substance. 
The life which animates it is not his own life, but 
a constantly inflowing force from the divine life. 
In Him we live, move and have our being. The 
spirit's individuality, his impenetrability, resides in 
his free agency, in his volition, in his power so to 
turn or modify his own spiritual forms one way or 
another, that the divine life flowing in shall create 
through and around him one kind of a world or 
another. 

This is not pantheism. If the universe was 
God, He would create all its external forms in 
correspondence with his own infinite divine love 
and wisdom. There could be no evil, no hideous 
things moral or physical, no suffering, no disease, 
no death, no hell. The fact that such things exist 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 151 

is proof that some great determining power inter- 
venes between God and the universe. That power 
is the free agency, the selfhood of our spirits. 

Again, nature is not God, any more than the 
emanations of a man's mind constitute the man. 
Take nature away, obliterate every organic form 
from the dew-drop to the sun, and God remains the 
same, infinite, indivisible, self-existing, sole-existing 
Spirit. 

The love and wisdom emanating from the Su- 
preme Being may then be so appropriated by the 
selfhood of his creatures as to be turned into hatred 
and folly. This is the origin of evil and of hell. 
The angel receives them in a different manner. By 
obedience to the divine law, he permits the divine 
love and wisdom to reign in him and to work 
through him. He knows that nothing is his own. 
His apparent goodness and truth are the Lord's 
love and wisdom, received, implanted and mani- 
fested in his life. In profound humility and self- 
renunciation he feels that he is not good ; that he 
is not wise ; that " there is none good but God." 

The evil spirit claims everything as his own. 
He maintains that his evil is good and that his 
falsity is truth. 

It is the presence of the Lord, therefore, through 



152 THE OTHER LIFE. 

reception and obedience, in the heart of the angels, 
which constitutes heaven ; first the heavenly state 
or life, and next the heavenly place or objective 
world. 

The sphere of the Lord which constitutes heaven 
in the hearts of the angels, is love. Heaven is love. 
Love to the Lord and love to the neighbor are the 
life of heaven, and there is no heaven without 
them. This life is attained by obedience to the 
divine commandments. What we call the com- 
mandments of God are simply the laws or modes 
of his own Divine existence, stated to us in legal 
forms for our spiritual guidance. To keep the 
commandments is to live like God in our finite 
sphere; hence to be like Him; hence, by spiritual 
affinity, to love Him; and, finally, by the great law 
of spiritual attraction, to be with Him. 

" If any man hear my voice and open the door, 
I will come in to him, and will sup with him and 
he with Me. ? 

" The love of God, the fealty we owe him 
Implanted in our hearts and fruitful there, 
Will make our outward life a noble poem 
By making first the inner life a prayer." 

The whole Christian world has some idea of this 
presence of God in the human soul. It knows that 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN 153 

this is "the kingdom of God" which is said to be 
within us, and which comes without observation. 

Augustine beautifully observes : 

" Too late I sought Thee ; too late I found Thee. 
I sought Thee at a distance and did not know that 
Thou wert near. I sought Thee abroad in thy 
works ; and behold ! Thou wert within me !" 

The Christian world, however, does not under- 
stand that this God-in-the-heart is heaven ; that 
love and charity are the whole of it ; that the en- 
tire spiritual world is created continuously out of it 
and through it ; that the degree and state of it in 
ourselves determine what heaven we shall go to; 
what we shall see there and do there ; and the form 
under which the Divine Being shall manifest Him- 
self to us. 

Is there any other presence of the Lord in the 
spiritual world besides that which proceeds from 
the secret, inward appropriation of the divine love 
and wisdom, manifested spiritually as love and 
charity ? 

Yes. Every internal presence must have its 
outward correspondential form, its external mani- 
festation. The Lord, who is all-in-all in the an- 
gelic soul, is also, in some manner, the all-in-all of 
the angelic world. The whole universe around us 



154 THE OTHER LIFE. 

hereafter will be a splendid theatre representing 
under symbolic forms the ineifable mysteries of the 
Lord's spiritual kingdom. We will then under- 
stand the words of the poet : 

" The sun, the moon, the stars, 
The seas, the hills, the plains ; 
Are not all these, O soul ! 
The Vision of Him who reigns?" 

There, however, we shall have the key to the 
vision, and we shall read, as in an ever-newly- 
ereated book, the sublime movements of the Provi- 
dence within us. 

The chemist and naturalist tell us that the vast 
coal-beds of the earth are condensations of the heat 
and light which prevailed in the primeval ages of 
the world. We will understand, hereafter, how all 
visible objects are condensations or concretions on 
different planes of being of the divine love and 
wisdom, which are the heat and light of the spiritual 
world. 

Though God is seen representatively in every- 
thing surrounding the angels, He is pre-eminently 
present and manifest in the spiritual Sun. He is 
called the Sun of righteousness because he is the 
sun visible to the righteous. It is said that there 
is no need of the sun or of the moon in heaven, but 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 155 

that the glory of God and the Lamb are the light 
of it. The glory of God is the divine love, which 
is received into the heart and projected outwardly, 
by the great law of spiritual creation, as a sun. 
The glory of God is, therefore, the cause of the 
spiritual sun, which, by its heat and light, is the 
great symbol and representative of the divine love 
and wisdom. 

The spiritual sun, thus representing the Lord 
from whom it directly proceeds, appears to every 
one according to his power of receiving and reflect- 
ing the spiritual light and heat it communicates ; 
high or low, near or remote, bright or dull, flaming 
with celestial gold, or resplendent with the silvery 
beams of the spiritual sphere. It appears always 
before the faces of the happy angels, who receive its 
warmth into their hearts, and its light into their 
minds. They never look toward it without think- 
ing of the Lord, and its appearance to them is an 
ever-flaming revelation of the state of their own 
heart toward God. 

Evil spirits, alas ! have turned their backs upon 
it, for they have denied and forgotten the Lord, 
and it is a dull, lurid spot in their murky atmo- 
spheres. 

Is there no personal manifestation of the Lord 



156 THE OTHER LIFE. 

to the angels, as that of man to man face to 
face? 

Yes; ever since the Supreme Being assumed a 
human body and rose with its spiritual form into 
heaven, He has become the Divine Man, and fre- 
quently stands revealed in that Divine Humanity 
to the humble and loving children of his heavenly 
kingdom. 

It is a law of the spiritual world that when a 
spirit fixes the heart and mind on any person with 
strong intent and aspiration, that person will appear 
in apparent space under a form determined by the 
state of the thinker himself. When therefore an 
angel in his hour of fervent prayer, draws near to 
his Maker in the serene strength and glow of faith 
and love, the Lord may appear outwardly before 
him, face to face, eye to eye, like man to man. 

This God, who is the all-in-all of the heavens, 
is Jesus Christ. The " Father " of our theological 
speculations, is an abstraction which no man has 
ever seen or can see. The Son alone hath revealed 
Him. The Godhead, so far as it can be manifested 
to finite beings, exists in the Divine Humanity, 
known historically to the men of this earth as the 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

Said He not of Himself? — 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 157 

" I am Alpha and Omega : the beginning and 
the ending : which is, and which was, and which is 
to come : the Almighty." 

It will be profitable for us to inquire into the 
great spiritual laws which govern these manifesta- 
tions of the Divine Presence to both men and 
angels; for there is nothing in them accidental or 
arbitrary or miraculous in the common acceptation 
of that word. A true conception of this subject 
will give us a clear insight into some of the most 
remarkable things related in the letter of Scripture. 

It is a great law that God can never appear to 
man or angel as He really is ; but the appearance 
is determined and modified by the state of the per- 
son into whom He flows, and to whom he appears 
outwardly, — the external appearance being always a 
correspondence of the internal experience. 

This explains the curious fact of the Lord's 
varying appearances to his disciples after his death. 
Mary, who was so intimate with Him, mistakes 
Him for the gardener and inquires after the Lord. 
Peter and John, speaking to Him in the broad 
daylight, do not know Him, until a miracle sug- 
gests his true character to them. Other disciples 
walk with Him and converse with Him on his 
own death and resurrection : but " their eyes are 

14 



158 THE OTHER LIFE. 

holden" and they do not know Him. They recog- 
nize Him in the breaking of bread ; and lo ! He 
vanishes from their sight. 

The same Divine Being has appeared to patri- 
archs, prophets and apostles under many different 
forms : frequently as an angel called " the angel of 
Jehovah;" as a man wrestling all night with 
Jacob ; as a man standing with a drawn sword 
before Joshua; even as three men appearing to 
Abraham ; as a human being dying a shameful 
death upon the cross ; as a risen body showing to 
an unbelieving soul the print of the nails and the 
mark of the spear ; as a dazzling splendor on the 
mount conversing with Moses and Elias; as a form 
of light ascending to heaven ; as a flaming angel 
standing in the sun; as "the Ancient of days" 
seated upon a sapphire throne with "the appear- 
ance of fire" round about Him. 

God is unchangeable, infinite in form and perfec- 
tions. These varying manifestations are the records 
and expressions of varying states of reception in 
the finite soul of man and the finite Church. God 
is finited in appearance, whenever his Spirit enters 
into the perceptive faculties of his finite creatures. 
All men and angels might thus see God at the 
same moment of time throughout the entire uni- 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 159 

verse, and no two of them could have precisely the 
same revelation. 

To see God therefore is no such wonderful and 
impossible thing as a sensuous mode of thought 
interprets it to be. It is simply to have an ex- 
ternal or symbolic representation of the state of 
your own soul as to its reception of the divine love 
aud wisdom. 

Before the Lord assumed a human form by the 
process of birth and growth in this world, He had 
no spiritual body of his own. by which He could 
appear to the angels. " The Angel of Jehovah " 
who spoke in the first person as if he was the 
Lord himself, was always some angel, whose con- 
sciousness and selfhood were laid entirely asleep 
while the Divine Spirit spake through him. 
When the angel returned to his pwn state, he had 
no recollection of what had transpired or of any- 
thing he had said. 

Swedenborg says of this manifestation through 
angels, not from them : 

" In order that man may be spoken to by vocal 
expressions, which are articulate sounds in the ulti- 
mates of nature, the Lord uses the ministry of 
angels by filling them with the Divine Spirit, and 
by laying asleep what is of their own selfhood, so 



160 THE OTHER LIFE. 

that they think they are Jehovah while speaking. 
Thus the divine of Jehovah, which is supreme, 
descends into the lowest spheres of nature in 
which man sees and hears. Hence it may appear 
how the angels spake by the prophets, viz., that 
the Lord himself spake, although by angels, and 
that the angels did not speak at all of them- 
selves." 

This possession of one spirit by another so that 
the latter thinks, speaks, acts, or writes at the dic- 
tation of the former, without the least intervention 
of his own individuality and without his subse- 
quent remembrance of what had occurred, has been 
frequently and abundantly confirmed and illustrated 
by the strange psychological phenomena which have 
excited so much credulity and incredulity during 
the present century. 

The appearance of Jehovah to Abraham under 
the form of three men can thus be made credible. 
Jehovah can take spiritual possession of a man in 
the flesh as easily as of a spirit. In modern times 
it might be called mesmeric possession. Three 
strangers or travelers passing through the country 
may have been used as mediums or ministers. 
They are brought to Abraham, who perceived by 
interior illumination that they represent the Divin- 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 161 

ity. He speaks of thein and prays to them as if 
they were one person. They deliver the message 
of God and go on their way, utterly ignorant, 
when they come to themselves, of the whole trans- 
action. 

A similar phenomenon took place when two an- 
gels or messengers, evidently two men (for the peo- 
ple of Sodom saw them also), visited Lot and saved 
him and his family from the fearful destruction 
which fell upon the cities of the plain. So also a 
man wrestled with Jacob all night so that he re- 
ceived a permanent muscular deformity, and Jacob 
exclaimed in the morning, " I have seen God face 
to face, and my life is preserved." 

This theory that the persons who appeared to 
Abraham, Lot and Jacob were really men in the 
flesh, representing per force the Divine character, 
although not distinctly announced by Swedenborg, 
is fully accordant with his philosophy. Most of 
the cases of spiritual vision recorded in the Bible 
were of course openings of th^ spiritual sight ; but 
in these cases there seems to have been no opening 
of the spiritual sight, and all the phenomena prove 
them to have really taken place in the natural 
world. 

These appearances on earth were as strictly sym- 

14 * 



162 THE OTHER LIFE. 

bolical or representative of spiritual things as all 
appearances in the spiritual world are. Why did 
Abraham see three men as one God? Because 
Abraham at that time represented the childhood of 
the church, or of the Lord in the church, when it 
is particularly under the care of the celestial an- 
gels, and before Isaac (representing the rational 
principle) was born. So long as men think sen- 
suously, or in accordance with the reports of the 
senses, and do not correct their first impressions by 
rational analysis, the divine trinity of Love, Wis- 
dom and Use, known also as Father, Son and Holy 
Ghost, is presented to their perceptive faculties as 
three distinct persons ; while their higher intuitions 
speak loudly for the essential unity of the God- 
head. 

The mass of the Christian world has not yet de- 
veloped beyond this stage of sensuous interpreta- 
tion. The cultivation of the rational and scientific 
elements of thought will lead it to higher ground 
and enable it to substitute real for apparent truths. 

Why did God appear under a dual and not a 
triune human form to Lot? In correspondence 
with the things represented, which were those re- 
lating to judgment, involving the salvation of the 
faithful and the damnation of the wicked. The 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 163 

Divine Love or Father, the essential Divine, as 
Swedenborg calls it, never judges. Therefore he is 
left out. 

"The Father judgeth no man, but hath given all 
judgment to the Son/ 7 

" I will send the Comforter to you, and when He 
is come He will reprove the world of sin, of right- 
eousness and of judgment." 

When we refer to the sublime and mysterious 
representations of God, which were made visible to 
the prophet Ezekiel and to the Apostle John, rep- 
resentations which were seen in the open heavens, 
enough has been said to prove the organic spiritual 
law, that God appears to every one according to his 
state, and that the capabilities of the state, intellect- 
ual and. moral, determine the form and manner in 
which the Divine Being shall be made objective to 
him. 

The same law, with its special limitations, has 
always prevailed and will prevail for ever. It is 
just as credible that Swedenborg saw and conversed 
with God, as it is that Abraham or Moses or Paul 
did so. It is an occurrence which is possible to all 
men and which happens very frequently in the 
spiritual world. There is nothing miraculous about 
it. God is always speaking to us; in nature, in 



164 THE OTHER LIFE. 

his Word, in his providence, in our- own souls ; and 
imvardly through spirits and angels. The wonder 
is, not that God speaks to us, but that we, poor 
ignorant creatures, refuse to believe it and will not 
hear him. 

We have no statement from Swedenborg himself 
either printed or written of the first manifestation 
of the Lord Jesus Christ to his mental vision. 
There is a story handed down by tradition, and 
which contains nothing improbable, that while eat- 
ing heartily at dinner, his spiritual eyes were opened 
for a moment or so, during which he saw his floor 
covered with serpents and toads, representative of 
the gross evils of gluttony, and a man in the corner 
of the room who said to him, " Eat not so much." 

The next night, the same man appeared to him, 
this time, as Dr. Beyer professes to have received 
from the mouth of Swedenborg, " sitting in purple 
and majestic splendor near his bed." This man or 
angel or spirit, or the Lord himself shorn of his 
glory and veiled in accommodation to the state of 
the new seer, gave him a commission to open the 
spiritual sense of the Word of God. 

" I Lave been called," says Swedenborg, in a let- 
ter to Dr. Hartley, dated 1769, " to a holy office by 
the Lord himself, who has most graciously mani- 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 165 

fested himself in person to me, his servant, in the 
year 1743; when he opened my sight to the view 
of the spiritual world, and granted me the privilege 
of conversing with spirits and angels, which I en- 
joy to this day." 

In the other life it is spiritual affinity, nearness, 
likeness, sympathy which determine presence. The 
Lord is omnipresent, but He is most nearly and dis- 
tinctly and sweetly present to those who love Him 
most and thence know Him best. 

The angels who understand intuitively the rela- 
tion between the subjective and objective in the 
other life, and who see in everything some manifes- 
tation of the Divine, do not mistake the appearance 
of the Lord in their apparent spaces and times for 
a form possessing any fixedness or real externeity. 
They know it to be a heavenly vision, varying in 
power, beauty and glory according to their own 
interior states. 

The following elucidative paragraph from Swe- 
denborg is very interesting : 

" When the Lord appears in heaven, which often 
occurs, He does not appear clothed with the sun, 
but in an angelic form, distinguished from the 
angels by the Divine which is translucent in his 
face. For the Lord is not there in person, be- 



166 THE OTHER LIFE. 

cause in person He is always encompassed with the 
sun ; but He is present there by aspect. It is com- 
mon in heaven for persons to appear as present in 
the place where the view is fixed or terminated, 
although it is very far from the place where they 
actually are. This presence is called the presence 
of the internal sight, of which I shall speak here- 
after. I have also seen the Lord out of the sun 
and a little beneath in an angelic form ; and also 
near to me, in a similar form with a resplendent 
countenance; and once as a flaming or burning 
light in the midst of the angels." 

This last manifestation reminds us of the mys- 
tical splendors of the sublime vision of Ezekiel : 

" Then I beheld, and lo ! a likeness as the ap- 
pearance of fire : from the appearance of his loins, 
even downward, fire; and from his loins even up- 
ward, as the appearance of brightness, as the color 
of amber." 

In No. 40 of Earths in the Universe, is a re- 
markable account of a personal manifestation of 
the Lord Jesus Christ to certain spirits as a Divine 
Man standing in the sun of the spiritual world. 
It is there stated also that several spirits who had 
been men upon earth in the lifetime of Jesus, and 
who had seen and known him, declared before the 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 167 

whole company that the person appearing in the 
sun was the identical God-Man, Jesus Christ, 
whom they had known on earth. 

The last means or medium by which the Lord 
is present in the spiritual world is through his 
written Word. This is astonishing to those who 
do not believe in the inspiration of the Holy Scrip- 
tures, and to those also who suppose them to be 
nothing but a literal message from God to man 
like the written or printed laws by which a king 
may govern his subjects. 

Swedenborg asserts that the Word is absolutely 
divine ; that it is not only the crowm of revelation, 
but "the plenitude of God." Its inmost is the 
Divine Truth or the Divine Mind itself. 

" In the beginning was the Word, and the Word 
was with God, and the Word was God." 

"And the Word was made flesh and dwelt 
among us." 

This conception of the true nature of the Bible, 
vastly exceeds any thought of its inspiration or 
holiness ever before promulgated. In its inmost it 
is God himself; absolute divine truth, incommuni- 
cable to finite creatures. It descended through the 
minds of the celestial angels and was presented 
outwardly to them by special dictation as a grand 



168 THE OTHER LIFE. 

system of celestial truth. Flowing thence through 
the spiritual heavens, it was dictated in a form of 
spiritual truth. Descending still lower into the 
natural degree, it took on a natural and literal 
form, apparently imperfect, feeble, obscure, accom- 
modated to the feeblest and obscurest states of the 
human understanding. 

Now all these senses, utterly different in ex- 
ternal appearance as they are— the divine, the 
celestial, the spiritual, the natural — are absolutely 
one. They coexist, cohere and connect by corre- 
spondential forms in all the spheres of creation. 
When man upon earth reads a verse in the letter 
humbly and believingly, spiritual angels instantly 
perceive it in the spiritual sense, celestial angels 
in the celestial sense, the Lord hears and feels it, 
and the Divine Truth runs the whole scale of 
thought from centre to circumference. Thus we 
are consociated with angels and conjoined to the 
Lord by means of his Word. 

The Word, written by angels from direct divine 
dictation, is preserved in every heavenly society 
with great care, and is approached with profound 
reverence. It is the source of all their wisdom 
and power. The public worship is from the Word, 
and the minister does not explain its meaning from 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 169 

his self-derived intelligence, but from interior illu- 
mination, so that he can diseover and draw forth 
truths which were not visible from an exterior 
standpoint. The Word is appealed to in all cases 
of doubt or difficulty ; for the Law of the Lord 
reigns supreme in heaven. The Word there an- 
swers all the questions of the earnestly-seeking 
soul, as the precious stones on the breast-plate of 
the high-priest responded to his prayers by beau- 
tiful variations of their light. 

These copies of the Word shine in heaven with 
a great light, varying in color, power and beauty 
with the states of the particular society. They 
illumine the temples where they are kept, and even 
the faces of the angels who assemble to hear, as the 
face of Moses was brightened by gazing on the 
tablets containing the decalogue. The sphere of 
the Word, which is in reality that of God himself, 
cannot be safely approached by those who are in 
contrary or unloving and unbelieving states. Swe- 
denborg saw this attempted by unprepared spirits, 
but they were hurled senseless to the ground with 
phenomena resembling thunder and lightning. 
This explained to him the miraculous power 
which emanated from the ark of the covenant, 

prostrating the statues of heathen gods before it, 
n H 



170 THE OTHER LIFE. 

and instantly destroying those who touched it pro- 
fanely or even innocently. The ark of the cov- 
enant represented the Word in the heavens ; and 
what seemed a miracle from the earthly standpoint, 
was the orderly operation of a spiritual law. 

It gives great offence, without any rational 
foundation, to the leaders in orthodox commun- 
ions, that Swedenborg should assert that the Epis- 
tles, the Acts of the Apostles and several minor 
books in the Old Testament, are not of equal value 
with the rest of the Scriptures. Some of them 
even intimate that Swedenborg found it convenient, 
in defence of his new theology, to expunge from 
the canon those portions which militate most 
against it. How utterly unfounded such a charge 
is, will be apparent on the slightest examination of 
the facts. 

The separate books of which the Bible is com- 
posed were written in different ages and places and 
by different persons. They were not collected into 
one volume until several hundred years after Christ. 
The task of separating the true Word of God from 
the mass of spurious or apocryphal literature which 
had gathered around it was undertaken by councils 
of bishops, or left to individual churches. There 
was no great guiding light or principle. The de- 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 171 

cision was reached through fancy or prejudice, upon 
meagre facts and unsatisfactory data. It was fre- 
quently made by vote ! 

The consequence was, that apocryphal books 
were read in many churches for several centuries, 
and that the grandest of all the Sacred Books, the 
Revelation, was for a long time rejected by the 
highest authorities. A still greater evil resulted, 
viz., that the whole theory of inspiration was made 
to rest upon tradition and authority, and the 
Church bound down to literal interpretations, so 
that it has never had any worthy conception of 
what the divinity of the Word is. 

Swedenborg comes with a key to the biblical 
mysteries; a key which he did not invent, but 
which was given to him. We apply this key to 
five-sixths of the books bound up as the Word of 
God, and we find it to draw from them spiritual 
truths full of wisdom and beauty. We find also 
that it has no more application to the remaining 
books than it has to the orations of Cicero. They 
have no spiritual sense and no human ingenuity 
can put one into them. The difference between the 
genuine Word of God and the pious works which 
have been mistakenly bound up with it, is funda- 
mental, organic and eternal ; a difference easily dis- 



172 THE OTHER LIFE. 

covered by those who will give the matter a patient 
and candid investigation. 

The apostolic writings, however, are of great 
theological value. They have subserved an im- 
portant use in the first Christian Church, and will 
ever be referred to under the New Dispensation, as 
only of less importance than the veritable Word 
of God. Swedenborg's estimate of their character 
is thus given : 

" In regard to the writings of Paul and the other 
apostles, I have not given them a place in the Ar- 
cana Coelestia, because they are dogmatic writings 
merely, and not written in the style of the Word, 
as are those of the Prophets, of David, of the 
Evangelists and the Revelation of St. John. The 
style of the Word consists throughout in corre- 
spondences, and thence effects an immediate com- 
munication with heaven; but the style of these 
dogmatic writings is quite different, having indeed 
communication with heaven, but only mediately or 
indirectly." 

" The reason why the apostles wrote in this style 
was, that the new Christian Church had to make 
its beginning through them ; consequently the style 
used in the Word would not have been proper for 
such doctrinal tenets, which required plain and 



PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN. 173 

simple language suited to the capacities of all 
readers. Nevertheless the writings of the apostles 
are very good books for the Church, as they insist 
on the doctrine of charity and faith thence derived 
as strongly as the Lord himself has done in the 
gospels and in the Revelation of St. John." 

Reviewing this whole question of the presence of 
the Lord in heaven and in the human heart, and 
the spiritual laws by which revelation is effected, 
and especially the true nature of the Divine Word, 
it becomes clear to the mind, how an unfolding, by 
divine commission and special illumination, of the 
spiritual sense of that Word, is a veritable Second 
Coming of the Lord. This is the means whereby 
the New Jerusalem, a compact body or system of 
spiritual truth leading to an angelic life upon earth, 
is " descending from God out of heaven." 

How long will the professed church of Christ 
fail to recognize this stupendous blessing, of which 
Swedenborg has been only the passive medium? 
How long will it grope in the darkness of natural- 
ism, adhering to the falsities of the past, and fail to 
discover the great light which is already streaming 
from the open heavens, and which will illuminate, 
in the Lord's time, even the darkest corners of the 
earth? 

15* 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 

HOW are we engaged hereafter ? 
Dr. Chalmers, in an admirable discourse on 
" the new heaven and the new earth," exposes with 
a masterly hand the metaphysical delusions which 
exist in his own and all other evangelical denomi- 
nations on the immateriality of the life to come. 

He characterizes as " an imagination to be recti- 
fied, the product perhaps of a wrong but fashion- 
able philosophy," the prevalent idea, " that when a 
spiritualizing process has purged away all our cor- 
ruption, then by the stepping-stone of death and 
resurrection, we should be borne away to some ethe- 
real region, where sense and body and- all in the 
shape either of audible sound or of tangible sub- 
stance are unknown." 

" The common imagination," says he, making a 
most humiliating confession, "that we have of 
paradise on the other side of death, is that of a 
lofty aerial region, where the inmates float in ether 

174 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 175 

or are mysteriously suspended upon nothing ; where 
all the warm and sensible accompaniments, which 
give such an expression of strength and life and 
coloring to our present habitation, are attenuated 
into a sort of spiritual element, that is meagre and 
imperceptible and uninviting to the eye of mortals 
here below — where every vestige of materialism is 
done away." 

Such is a picture of the Christian heaven drawn 
by a most learned and devout Christian minister ! 
Contrast it with the true idea of heaven which 
even children, untutored by catechisms, glean in- 
tuitively from the express declarations of Scripture, 
the appearance of angels, and the recorded visions 
of prophets and apostles. Do not the simple- 
minded laity, also, unblinded by metaphysical 
sophistries, think of heaven as the children do, as a 
world of superlative grandeur and beauty, full of 
visible and audible and tangible realities, and in- 
habited by glorious beings in the human form, 
living in splendid mansions and clad in radiant 
garments, displaying, also, the tender sympathies 
of human love and all the noble activities of the 
human intellect? 

" The holders of this imagination," continues Dr. 
Chalmers, in a deprecating manner, " forget all the 



176 THE OTHER LIFE. 

while that there is no essential connection between 
materialism and sin — that the world which we now 
inhabit had all the amplitude and solidity of its 
present materialism before sin entered into it." 

" Were our place of everlasting blessedness," he 
argues, "so purely spiritual as it is commonly 
imagined, then the soul of man, after having 
quitted his body at death, would quit it conclu- 
sively. Why should the disengaged spirit again 
be fastened to the drag of that grosser and heavier 
substance, which many think has only the effect of 
weighing down its activity? What is the use of a 
resurrection, if the union that then takes place, is 
to deaden or to reduce all those energies which 
are ascribed to the living principle in a state of 
separation?" 

Surely the writer of this would have risen to 
clearer and nobler views of the soul, the resurrec- 
tion and the life to come, had he studied the phil- 
osophy of Swedenborg, which solves all his diffi- 
culties at once by teaching that the spiritual body 
and the world it lives in, are neither material nor 
immaterial, but substantial ! 

His strongest argument for the solidity or real- 
ity of the spiritual life, in opposition to the absurd 
im materialism which is everywhere taught, is drawn 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. Ill 

from the fact that God manifested Himself in the 
flesh, assumed, purified and glorified a human 
body, and ascended to heaven with it where He 
reigns for ever in it. 

"Does this look/' he continues, "like the abo- 
lition of materialism after the present system of it 
is destroyed? Or does it not rather prove, that, 
transplanted into another system, it will be pre- 
ferred to celestial honors, and prolonged in immor- 
tality throughout all ages ?" 

Had he understood how material and substantial 
things exist simultaneously in discrete degrees or 
planes of being, and undergo corresponding evolu- 
tions for ever, he would have escaped all this blun- 
dering in the dark, this confused and vague specu- 
lation, this annihilation of the physical world 
and this impossible transfusion of matter into 
spirit ! 

" Though a paradise of sense," he says in profes- 
sional qualification of his statements, " it will not 
be a paradise of sensuality. Though not so unlike 
the present world as many apprehend, there will be 
one point of total dissimilarity betwixt them. It 
is not the entire substitution of spirit for matter 
that will distinguish the future economy from the 

present. But it will be the entire substitution of 

H*" 



178 THE OTHER LIFE. 

righteousness for sin. It is this which signalizes 
the Christian from the Mohammedan paradise. Not 
that sense and substance and splendid imagery, and 
the glories of a visible creation seen with bodily 
eyes are excluded from it, but that all which is vile 
in principle and voluptuous in impurity will be 
utterly excluded from it. There will be a firm 
earth as we have at present, and a heaven stretched 
over it, as we have at present ; and it is not by the 
absence of these things, but by the absence of sin, 
that the abodes of immortality will be character- 
ized." 

The speculations of this great evangelical think- 
er, though far below the standard of New Church 
truth, and showing rather a brave search and 
struggle for light than the light itself, are cordially 
commended to those persons, who are afraid to 
think independently on those sublime themes, or 
even to think of them at all. They may infer from 
these views that it is unscriptural, unphilosophical 
and absurd, to speak or even think of heaven as a 
vague and felicitous state of the soul floating away 
in immaterial ethers. And that, on the contrary, 
it is highly rational and biblical to describe it as a 
genuine and beautiful world, full of glorious and 
saintly people, living in the constant exercise of 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 179 

all the activities, and in the enjoyment of all the 
pleasures of which the soul and body of man are 
capable. 

The scientific element predominates so largely in 
our modern culture, and the current theology is so 
utterly divorced from science, that in the minds of 
most men the spiritual and natural worlds stand 
far apart, without the least necessary or philosoph- 
ical connection. The result is a deep-rooted natu- 
ralism both in and out of the church, so that the 
intellect is actually offended at the idea of open 
communication with heaven, as if it were something 
absurd or impossible. 

Swedenborg teaches us the difference and the 
analogy between substance and matter, between 
the spiritual and natural worlds, and satisfies our 
rational faculty as to their corresponding laws and 
phenomena. This he has done under special and 
constant illumination from divine sources, sur- 
rounded by every safeguard to protect him from 
error or imposition. The Bible will hereafter be a 
sealed book only to those who refuse to examine 
the spiritual light revealed in its pages by its Di- 
vine Author through his chosen medium. To 
them, indeed, death will remain a dark shadow, 
and heaven a vague splendor, an imaginary state, 



180 THE OTHER LIFE. 

a celestial hope, a pious dream ; and the whole life 
to come a mystery, before which the uninstructed 
mind sinks down in helplessness or total apathy. 

We have seen in the previous chapters that 
heaven is, first, a state of love and charity in the 
heart ; secondly, and flowing from the first, a state 
of wisdom and illumination in the mind ; and 
thirdly, as an effect of these emotional and intel- 
lectual states, a vast world of beauty and glory, 
making precisely the same kind of impression 
upon our spiritual senses that the natural world 
makes upon our natural senses. 

Heaven begins at the centre, in a state of love 
and charity in the heart. That is the essential 
basis of its existence, the primal cause of its crea- 
tion. No physical changes, no variations of place, 
no possible yearnings or prayers can bring a soul 
into heaven. No learning, no wisdom, no spirit- 
ual illumination, no faith, no operations of the 
understanding, can of themselves advance the spirit 
one step nearer to the pearl-white gates and man- 
sions of the blessed. Love to God in the heart, 
charity to the neighbor, obedience to the divine 
laws, a life according to the commandments, how- 
ever acquired, under whatever names or forms or 
creeds; these are the passports to heaven, for these 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 181 

are the powers which create it and animate it and 
sustain it from one moment to another. 

The material of heaven is, therefore, a number- 
less multitude of souls, each one of whom is per- 
fectly submissive to the divine will, and loves his 
neighbor better than himself. Each one is ready 
and eager to give, not only much but all he has 
for the benefit of others, and to devote his labors 
and consecrate his life to the common good. This 
lofty ideal is attained by a good life on earth, and 
by the judgment after death, when the good and 
evil elements in the character are separated, the 
evil cast out or made thoroughly dormant, and the 
good made the ruling loves and guiding principles 
of the future life. 

Souls, such as we have described the angels to 
be, live in society with each other. Men, as we 
see them here on earth, are gregarious, like ani- 
mals ; but angels are consociative ; that is, they are 
drawn together by spiritual affinities, and they are 
arranged or organized into societies, series, orders 
and degrees, according to the special functions they 
can discharge. The organizing power is not the 
selfhood of the spirit, nor the rule of the strongest, 
nor a transmuted authority, nor the will of a 
majority. The organizing power is the love and 

16 



182 THE OTHER LIFE. 

Avisdom of God, flowing through authentic and 
recognized channels, felt in every heart, clearly 
comprehended in every mind. There is no possi- 
ble collision of interests or powers or forces, be- 
cause all these have been surrendered to God. 
He assigns every angel his post and office, just as 
He keeps every star in its place throughout the 
shining abysses of the natural sphere. 

The type upon which all the heavenly organi- 
zations are effected is the Human Form, that tran- 
scendent epitome of all the principles, forms and 
powers of the universe, that image and likeness of 
God. Each society is constituted and each heaven 
is consolidated on the principle of the human body, 
in which every organ and every cell and unit of an 
organ, lives and works for the benefit of all the 
rest, and takes nothing from the common, fund but 
what is required to keep it in healthful, working 
condition. The life and joy of the soul are in the 
work and in the use or the good of it. 

Societies and individuals have their places, asso- 
ciations, powers, forms and objective surroundings 
according to the uses or functions they love to per- 
form. They differ widely in all these respects, 
but such is the divine order which prevails in 
heaven, that all the infinite parts work harmo- 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 183 

niously together to the common end ; and such is 
the perfection, peace and fitness of the whole, that 
the heavens appear in the sight of the Lord as one 
man, and each individual is a perfect miniature of 
the whole. 

This pure or unlimited and spiritual anatomy, 
this transcendental physiology, this universal phi- 
losophy of form, which redeems psychology from 
its abstractions and makes the universe a concrete, 
living cosmos, or organism of beauty, although first 
definitely stated by Swedenborg, has been dimly 
foreseen by other great thinkers. 

Paul, writing to the Corinthians, gives this heav- 
enly principle of organization the following expres- 
sion : 

"Now there are diversities of gifts but the same 
Spirit. And there are differences of administration 
but the same Lord. And there are diversities of 
operation, but it is the same God which worketh 
all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is 
given to every man to profit withal" (or for definite 
uses). 

After specifying some ten of the different func- 
tions of the Spirit in different individuals, he con- 
tinues : 

"But all these worketh that one and the self- 



184 THE OTHER LIFE. 

same Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he 
will. For as the body is one and hath many mem- 
bers; and all the members of that one body, being 
many, are one body; so also is Christ. For by one 
Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether 
we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or 
free." 

We shall understand more clearly what the occu- 
pations of these heavenly spirits are, if we first 
remove from our mind's eye, as calculated to 
obscure our perceptions, all those present and 
earthly engagements, which, by the very consti- 
tution of the spiritual world as unfolded by Swe- 
denborg, are unnecessary or impossible in the future 
life. 

The natural world is the sphere of birth and of 
death. In the spiritual world nothing is born and 
nothing dies. The natural world is fixed in time 
and space, not responding or responding very 
slowly to the spiritual changes of the soul. The 
spiritual world on the contrary is instantaneously 
plastic to the motions of the soul, of which its 
times, spaces and all its objective phenomena are 
strictly representative. From this philosophical 
basis there springs up at once a vast difference 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 185 

between the occupations of the inhabitants of the 
respective spheres. 

Abstract from the business of our world all the 
arts and trades and labors which are concerned in 
the feeding, clothing, housing and governing of 
mankind, what would be left? No seasons, no 
crops, no farming ; no hunting, no fishing ; no 
transportation of commodities, no bargain and 
sale; no wages, no property, no money or other 
representative of value; no manufactures, no house- 
building,, no planting, no quarrying ; no birth, no 
diseases, no death; no governments like ours, no 
elections, no taxes; no criminal jurisprudence; no 
wars, no treaties, no parties in Church or State. 
Take all these things and many others away from 
our conception of active life, and at first blush 
what an enormous vacuum is left ! It seems to us 
as if all was taken away, all motives to action ; 
yea, the very basis of aifection and thought. 

Now all these occupations, with the feelings, 
ideas and motives which they involve and engen- 
der, are peculiar to the natural world, to a realm 
of time and space in which fixed things are cre- 
ated, born, grow and die. They are necessary to 
this our first stage of existence, and are the very 
means of our rational development and of our 

16 * 



186 THE OTHER LIFE. 

preparation for the higher life. Their use, how- 
ever, is only temporary, and they obscure our per- 
ceptions of spiritual things, and hide from us the 
riches and glory of our future inheritance. Our 
life here is a fore-gleam of immortality. This 
world is the seed-field of elements which are to 
bear flower and fruit in heaven. 

These things do not exist in the spiritual world, 
because the operation of the law of creation there 
differs from its operation here, that being a world 
of spiritual substances and not one of inert mattei. 
Spiritual substances are emanations or concretions 
from a divine substance, and take form and color- 
ing from the operations of the Divine Mind, and 
from those of the finite minds which He creates. 
Our spiritual bodies, the garments they wear, the 
houses they live in, the objects which surround 
them, are all "made without hands." As Swe- 
denborg expresses it, they are all given freely by 
the Lord. Food, clothing, shelter, are no longer 
objects of painful solicitude. In our Father's house 
are "many mansions" prepared for us by Himself. 
We are fed with "angels' food," a spontaneous 
creation like the manna of the wilderness. We 
find ourselves daily clothed in correspondence with 
our interior states, like the lilies of the field which 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 187 

neither toil nor spin. The golden city " garnished 
with all manner of precious stones," and the river 
of life " clear as crystal," rise ever before us as in 
a ravishing and perpetual dream. 

" O sweet and blessed country ! 

The home of God's elect ; 
O sweet and blessed country ! 

That eager hearts expect. 
O fields that know no sorrow ! 

O state that fears no strife ! 
O princely bowers ! O land of flowers ! 

O realm and home of Life !" 

We can now see that the occupations of the other 
life are spiritual in their character. They all have 
reference to the growth and illumination of the 
mind, to the purification of the affections, and to 
the sanctification of the will and the conduct of the 
life on principles of love to the Lord and charity 
to the neighbor. To grow in wisdom, intelligence, 
goodness and usefulness for ever, is the life and 
felicity of heaven. 

When we say that the occupations of the heav- 
enly life are spiritual in their character, we are far 
from meaning that heaven is an infinite Church, 
and our life there a perpetual sabbath in the ordi- 
nary sense of these words. Take up any orthodox 



188 THE OTHER LIFE. 

work on the subject, and you will find that holiness, 
self-renunciation, faith, love, praise and prayer are 
considered as the elements and business of the 
heavenly life. This is a great mistake. These are 
only elements of the heavenly character which pre- 
pare one for the heavenly life. The heavenly life 
is one of constant spiritual activity, in which every 
intellectual faculty of the mind and every exalted 
affection of the heart is called into blissful ope- 
ration. 

The religious instinct of course exists in heaven 
in the highest degree ; but it is not the whole of 
heavenly life as is commonly supposed. There are 
private and public devotions, and the spirit in its 
exercises of praise and prayer rises to an ecstasy 
of faith and love, of which we 'have here no con- 
ception. The public worship is conducted by sing- 
ing, praying and expounding the Word of God, 
and the Church militant on earth receives its best 
inspiration from the Church triumphant in heaven. 
Religious offices perform there the same use they 
are designed to fill here ; they bring us into closer 
communion with the Divine Love, and renew the 
soul with heavenly strength and peace, only to fit 
us more thoroughly for the consociations of life and 
the discharge of all our social and domestic duties. 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 189 

The happiness of heaven depends on its neigh- 
borly activities, and not on its holiness or its 
prayers or its praises, although the former cannot 
exist without the latter. The joy of heaven is in 
use. ISTo genuine or permanent felicity can flow 
from abstract states of the mind, establishing a 
merely personal relation with God for the sake of 
one's own salvation. States of mind entered into 
as if no other beings were in existence but the soul 
and its Maker, must have in them a large element 
of selfishness. This is the religion of the hermit 
in his cave, or of St. Simon on his pillar, not that 
of Wesley in his camp-meetings, and of Howard in 
the prisons. Christians of the former class are 
besieged by devils, while the latter are attended 
and comforted by angels. 

No; the love of God is best exhibited in the 
love of the neighbor. Unless our love of God 
leads us to establish fraternal and helpful relations 
with all about us, it is a soul without a body; 
ideas without words to reveal them ; a house with- 
out a foundation. 

" He prayeth best who loveth best 
All things both great and small." 

The angels have learned that lesson, so hard for 



190 THE OTHER LIFE. 

the earnal mind to comprehend, that happiness 
consists in loving and obeying God so supremely, 
that our selfhood is put in the last and lowest 
place, and our life is expended upon and for 
others. 

This is to be like God. He did not create the 
world for the display of His own glory, as some of 
the old catechisms have it, but to make a universe 
of wise and happy creatures, and to flood all the 
spheres of creation with light and peace and beauty 
and eternal joy. To receive from Him and to give 
to others is the secret of heavenly happiness. The 
more the angel gives, the more he receives. The 
poorest is the richest. He that loses his life, finds 
it. The greatest is the servant of all. The wisest 
is the most childlike. Oh happy, glorious reversal 
of the aims, dispositions and feelings of our earthly 
and unregenerate state ! 

The occupations upon which the angelic energies 
are expended are domestic, social and civil. As 
the heavenly character begins with the heart, so 
the heavenly world begins with the home. Every 
society in heaven is a cluster of homes. Every 
house or home is a little paradise, in which an 
Adam and an Eve (for marriage is the proper state 
of the angels), conversing daily with Jehovah, en- 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 191 

joy in mutual love the eternity of wedded bliss. 
The married pair is the unit of heaven, represent- 
ing the union of the Good and the True in the 
church, and of the divine love and wisdom in the 
Divine Man. From the home, as the centre of life 
and power, proceed all the angelic activities for 
the public good. 

As the individuals of every society differ in 
talent and power, and in the degrees of love and 
wisdom they have received from the Lord ; as 
some are wiser and more capable than others ; and 
as all inferior things must be subordinated to supe- 
rior things, and inviolable order be prescribed for 
every office and function ; therefore there are gov- 
ernments in heaven. The government of heaven 
is that of mutual love. The law of the Lord is the 
only law that reigns or can be executed in those 
blissful spheres. They are governors and princes 
and rulers there, who have the law of the Lord 
most clearly inscribed upon their judgments and 
most deeply engraven upon their hearts. They 
do not desire office, nor are they elected to it. 
They hold it by virtue of their inherent capacity, 
patent to all eyes, of executing it best. This prin- 
ciple assigns every incumbent to his post, from the 
king and the priest to the humblest servant and 



192 THE OTHER LIFE. 

doorkeeper, and the highest and lowest are bound 
together by the golden chain of love. 

Talents are given to be employed, not to be 
buried in the ground. Every soul has a specific 
genius which constitutes its individuality. If the 
soul is immortal and retains its identity, it will be 
the same soul, intellectually and morally, that it 
was here. Therefore every faculty of man will 
come forth in the future life for its share of display, 
development and use. The man of science, the 
philosopher, the mathematician, the theologian will 
delight in study and reflection", and will communi- 
cate ever new and wonderful truths which they 
will draw from the exhaustless storehouses of the 
divine wisdom. Artists will gladden the eye with 
creations surpassing all terrestrial achievements. 
Poets will charm the mind with songs of peren- 
nial beauty. Musicians will ravish the soul with 
melodies of heaven. Death only frees, expands, 
elevates and glorifies all the capabilities of the 
good. 

There are games and amusements and social par- 
ties and public gatherings in heaven as well as on 
earth. Everything which ever recreated and de- 
lighted the heart of man, and which can be thor- 
oughly divested of evil and of the faintest sugges- 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 193 

tion of evil, will be reproduced hereafter in more 
beautiful, enchanting and enduring forms. Nor 
will that histrionic talent, which God has so largely 
showered upon man, fail to impart under the purest 
auspices the instruction and amusement it was 
designed to bestow. 

The life and joy of angels have a wider field of 
action than the pleasures of individual culture and 
the bestowal of their spiritual possessions upon 
others. Those happy beings have a vast series of 
duties to perform for the human race, which will 
be perpetual ; for the physical universe is the neces- 
sary basis of the spiritual, and men will never cease 
to be born in this world and to become angels in 
the next. 

" The angels of every society," says Swedenborg, 
" are sent on missions to men, to guard them and 
to withdraw them from evil affections and the 
thoughts thence originating, and to inspire them 
with good affections so far as they will freely 
receive them." 

"Are they not all ministering spirits?" says the 
apostle Paul. 

There are societies of angels who have the 
charge of infants, whom death has early released 
from the bondage of nature. 



194 THE OTHER LIFE. 

Other societies instruct and educate them as they 
grow up. 

There are some who assist in the resurrection of 
the dead, that perpetually-recurring miracle of 
divine love and power. 

There are some who protect the souls of those 
newly deceased from the infestations of evil spirits. 

There are some who are mediatory spirits be- 
tween one society and another, each representing 
his own society and speaking for it. 

There is thus a vast chain of connection and 
communication of all the societies with each other, 
so that the soul by successive progressions or 
changes of state may pass from one to another and 
explore all the wonders and glories of heaven. 

And this chain of connection reaches to men in 
the natural sphere. As that charming poet, Gerald 
Massey, sings : 

" Eyes watch us that we cannot see ; 

Lips warn us which we may not kiss: 
They wait for us, and starrily 

Lean toward us from heaven's lattices. 

" We cannot see them face to face ; 

But love is nearness : and they love 

Us yet, nor change with change of place, 

In their more human world above." 



THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN. 195 

Nor are heaven and earth the only fields of an- 
gelic love and labor ; for the angels are frequently 
sent into the hells, bearing the olive branch like 
commissioners of peace, to restrain the violence of 
infernal passion, and to mitigate the sufferings 
which evil spirits inflict upon each other. 

" These occupations of the angels," says Sweden- 
borg, " are their general ones ; but to every angel 
is assigned his own in particular. For every gen- 
eral use is composed of innumerable other uses. 
All and each of these are co-ordinated and subor- 
dinated according to divine order, and taken to- 
gether, they constitute and perfect the general use, 
which is the common good." 

This infinitely diversified and perfect system of 
organization is the form of heaven, the Grand 
Man. Into this form the divine love and wisdom 
flow, communicating as they descend the blessings 
of goodness and truth to each angel and spirit in 
his degree and according to his capacity. With 
the divine sphere, come not only affection and 
thought, but innocence, peace, joy, strength and 
power. Every nerve and fibre of the angelic form 
is perpetually pervaded with a serene delight. 

How can we attain this grand ideal of individual 
and social perfection ? We, who bear the mark of 



196 THE OTHER LIFE. 

the beast on our foreheads and the indenture of 
hereditary evil in our hearts; we, whose every step 
and thought and emotion have somewhat in them 
which is abhorrent to angels and to God ;~ we 
whose good deeds are selfish, whose very prayers 
and preachings are tainted with personal aspira- 
tions ; we, who assign to others a lower place than 
our own, who have pride to be wounded and vanity 
to be insulted ; we, whose avarice, ambition and 
sensuality cleave to our souls like the leprosy of 
Xaaman to his body ! 

How can ice inherit the kingdom of heaven ? 



CHAPTER IX. 

HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 

WE now approach that dark and doleful world 
w T hich is the opposite of heaven ; where love 
is turned into hatred and wisdom into folly ; light 
into darkness and pleasure into pain ; which the 
Scriptures symbolize to us as a "bottomless pit" or 
the " lake burning with brimstone and fire," and 
which men have in all ages imagined to be a fear- 
ful prison-house down, down deep in the caverns 
of the earth, or far beyond the faintest ray of sun 
or star in the darkness of the outermost abyss. 

What is it? Where is it? How came it? 
What will become of it ? 

Anxious, startling, but not irreverent questions ! 
They have been partially answered. The veil has 
been lifted from this portion of the spiritual world 
also. We have new light, new knowledge to dis- 
place our old errors and crude notions. We have 
more terrible conceptions of the nature of sin, and 
a clearer vindication of the character of God. 

17* 197 



198 THE OTHER LIFE. 

We must rid ourselves of certain false ideas 
commonly entertained on this subject before we 
can see the truth unfolded by Swedenborg in all 
its beauty and grandeur. We will state these 
fundamental errors as we consider them, enter our 
protest against them, and beg the reader to dismiss 
them from his mind, until he sees them rationally 
disproved by the counter-statement of the truth 
itself. 

Hell is not a place created by God for the pun- 
ishment of sin. On the contrary it is the heaven 
of the wicked, created by themselves. They rush 
into it and abide in it of their own accord. 

There is no attribute of God which calls for the 
punishment of sin or which could receive the least 
satisfaction from such punishment, any farther than 
it may be made a means of reforming and blessing 
the sinner. God is infinite love. His anger is a 
false inference drawn by the sensual man from his 
own state of evil and misery. God wills the same 
love, wisdom, peace, joy, to all in hell that he wills 
to all in heaven. He is the I Am, the sole-exist- 
ing, the unchangeable. 

There were no angels who fell from heaven and 
became devils ; but all angels and all devils were 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 199 

once men or women on some earth in the physical 
universe. 

There is no great Evil Spirit, the Devil, who 
concentrates about himself all the powers of hell 
and wars with the Almighty for the mastery of the 
universe. How the idea of the personality of the 
devil originated, will be explained in its proper 
place. 

The same universal truths which unfolded the 
mysteries of heaven, will reveal to us also the 
dreadful secrets of hell. These universal truths or 
keys are the doctrines of Influx, Free Agency, 
Degrees and Correspondence. 

God is the sole life of the universe. He does not 
create life but gives it. It is uncreated. We live by 
his life ; not by a force, derived perhaps from Him, 
but now fully our own and independent of Him ; 
but by life from moment to moment flowing from 
Him and received into our spirit. This is influx. 
There is not, therefore, one God in heaven and 
another or a different one in hell; one law in heaven 
and an opposite in hell ; an economy of grace in 
one and an economy of wrath in the other. The 
entire universe is held together by one breath, one 
life, one law. 

What, then, is our own ? Our will, our volition ; 



200 THE OTHER LIFE. 

the power of turning our spiritual bodies as we 
please — to or from God ; the power of determining 
our affections and thoughts, which are the spiritual 
substances of the soul, so that they shall present 
one form or another to the inflowing life of God; 
this is free-agency, never violated by God, because 
it is the fundamental distinction between man and 
God. If man w T ere not a free agent he would be a 
material part of God, moved like a machine ; and 
pantheism would be true. 

The divine influx is always the same. The form 
determines how it shall be outwardly manifested. 
This is the atomic arrangement of the spiritual 
world corresponding to what we see daily in the 
natural world. The same influx of the sun pro- 
duces the beautiful and the hideous in nature, the 
nutritious and the poisonous; the golden flower, 
emblem of sweetest thought, and the repulsive 
weed, fit only to be trodden under foot. The 
atomic arrangement of the vegetable and animal 
cells, all at first inspection undistinguishable from 
each other, determines what forms shall appear, 
whether it shall be a silver lily or a livid fungus; 
a scaly serpent or a burnished dove. The same 
law prevails in heaven and in hell and upon earth. 

Hell, therefore, is created just as heaven is ere- 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 201 

ated. It is first an organic state of the soul, and 
then an external place or world produced in corre- 
spondence with that state. There are three hells 
opposite to the three heavens ; for the three degrees 
which exist in the human soul, natural, spiritual 
and celestial, open after death into the heaven or 
the hell which man has chosen for himself by his 
life in the world. 

The primal cause of heaven and all its phenom- 
ena was shown to be the God-in-the-heart of the 
angels — that is, the love to God and the charity to 
the neighbor which engaged and exercised their 
supreme affections. This is the cause of all their 
light or wisdom, and of the glorious and beautiful 
objective world spread out before them, represent- 
ing in living symbolism the spiritual mysteries of 
the kingdom of God within them. 

It is obedience to the Divine will, making the 

angel like God, the finite image and likeness of 

God, which permits the influent life of God to pass 

forth into such resplendent external forms, and to 

make the glory and beauty and peace and joy of 

heaven. Disobedience to the Divine will, unlike- 

ness to God, hideous moral deformity is, on the 

same principle, the cause of hell. It is a question 

of media. Angelic media, organized forms of love 

I* 



202 THE OTHER LIFE. 

and charity, produce heaven. Infernal media, 
organized forms of hatred and falsity, produce hell. 

Love is the life of heaven ; hatred, the life of 
hell. The hatred of hell is the outward manifesta- 
tion of a life which has been changed into its oppo- 
site by its passage through an utterly selfish form. 
The common spirit of all the hells, their connecting 
bond, is hatred to God and the neighbor. This 
hatred is the legitimate result of the love of self, 
when it rises from the place it was designed to 
occupy — the last and lowest — and absorbs and 
governs the whole soul. 

The madness, the insanity of self-love cannot be 
seen in this world, while the subject of it, the selfish, 
avaricious or ambitious man, is surrounded by ex- 
ternal restraints, such as the fear of the law or of 
the loss of life' or reputation. After death, when 
the .spirit acts from the ruling love alone without 
such external bonds, it rushes headlong into the 
wildest excesses, desires to possess all things, to 
rule over all things, even heaven and God himself, 
and burns with hatred and revenge against every 
object which stands or seems to stand in the way 
of its inordinate lusts. 

The hatred of evil spirits against the angels, 
against little children, against the good and the 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 203 

true in any other spirit, and especially against the 
Divine Word and the sphere of the Lord, is intense 
and almost incredible. Swedenborg frequently saw 
it exhibited as a blind, insensate but impotent fury. 
The cause of it is the interior antagonism between 
evil and good, so that the sphere of love and 
wisdom produces severe pain in the wicked. 

"Art thou come hither to torment us?" ex- 
claimed the evil ones to Jesus of Nazareth. 

This fire of self-love in the heart, engendering 
pride, hatred, contempt, scorn, menace, revenge, 
malice, cruelty and all evil passions, is the hell-fire 
which torments the wicked for ever and ever. 

The heat and light of the spiritual world corre- 
spond to the love and wisdom of those there, or to 
their opposites. The mind of an angel is radiant 
with intelligence, because his heart is glowing with 
love. The mind of a devil is dark with falsity, 
because his heart burns with hate. His thoughts 
correspond to his affections. The ignorance, the 
stupidity, the hallucinations, the malicious cunning, 
the absurd opinions, the monstrous conceptions, the 
ridiculous fantasies, the vituperative argumentation 
from false premises to false conclusions, which pre- 
vail continually in every society in hell, and which 
produce a representative sound like snarling, or 



204 THE OTHER LIFE. 

gnashing of teeth, heard by those approaching from 
a distance ; all these things have no analogies upon 
earth except what may be found in some vast in- 
sane asylum, where men bereft of reason are con- 
gregated in every stage of madness — from the rav- 
ing maniac to the drivelling imbecile. 

Wisdom is light ; its absence is darkness. 
Heaven is a world of light; hell, a world of 
darkness. Think of a kingdom of darkness ! a 
world without the silvery or golden rays of a sun, 
but lit by flames as from burning coals or sulphu- 
reous vapors, or by the wandering ignes fatui and 
ghastly blue lights of swamps and wildernesses. 
Such is hell. Some evil spirits are at times 
plunged in total darkness. Even comparatively 
good spirits, undergoing vastation or judgment in 
the world of spirits or intermediate state, are some- 
times kept for a long time in utter darkness. 

Is not the fear of the dark, which children and 
even grown persons instinctively feel, a correspond- 
ence? — an involuntary shrinking of the soul from 
what represents the evil and the false ? 

These poor souls in hell cannot be visited by the 
light of heaven. Its accompanying heat would 
torture them by being turned into intense cold, and 
its light would not be seen by them at all, but 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 205 

would obliterate what little light of their own 
they were enjoying in their sad, painful, pitiable 
way. The reason is that the light of heaven and 
the light of hell, although coming originally from 
the same source, flow through different media, and 
do not accord or correspond. An analogous phe- 
nomenon is seen on earth. Two waves of light, 
not according or corresponding, but coming into 
collision, produce darkness. Two rays of heat can 
also be made to produce cold or a fall in the ther- 
mometer ; and two waves of sound may result, not 
in a sound of double .intensity, but in absolute 
silence. 

Heaven is concealed from the spirits in hell • for 
they cannot feel its heat nor see its light nor 
breathe its atmosphere. They deny its existence, 
they scoff at the idea of God, rave against the 
name of Christ and the Word, and attribute all 
things to nature as stoutly as the most inveterate 
scientific infidels of our own day. They can be 
brought back, however, into their earthly states of 
thought, and then adjoined to the intellectual 
sphere of the angels, so that they can think from 
their standpoint, and thus see all the wonders of 
heaven and understand all the truths of the Lord's 
spiritual kingdom. But when they return into the 

18 



206 THE OTHER LIFE. 

state of thought which corresponds with their own 
emotional life (and they cannot rest permanently 
in any other), they forget everything they had seen 
or heard, and regard the wisdom of heaven with 
intense aversion. 

What bodies have they? The spiritual body 
being the effigy of the soul, that which effigies a 
hateful and false nature must necessarily be hideous 
and ugly. The devils are therefore deformed and 
monstrous, fierce and cruel in aspect, hairy, black, 
filthy, a horrible mixture of man and beast. Their 
faces are sometimes lurid, sometimes like those of 
corpses, always fearful and disgusting. The sound 
of their voice is harsh and grating ; the tones full 
of subtlety, malice, hatred and revenge. The 
stench that exhales from them is intolerable, differ- 
ing with every society and every individual. All 
these external horrors are in strict correspondence 
with their interior states. 

Yet such is the infinite self-conceit and delirious 
intellectual fantasies of these unhappy creatures, 
that they seem to each other to be men and women, 
wise and accomplished and enjoying a fair share 
of personal attractions ! " This is of the Lord's 
mercy," says Swedenborg, " lest they should seem 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 207 

as filthy, one to another, as they appear before the 
angels." 

The abodes of these evil spirits and the object- 
ive world about them are also produced, as in the 
case of angels, from their own affections and 
thoughts. 

Behold how they appeared to an eye-witness 
who lived consciously in both worlds at the same 
time : 

" The hells appear, some like dens and caverns, 
some like great chasms and whirlpools, some like 
bogs and others like lakes of water. They are not 
opened except wdien evil spirits (once men) from 
the world of spirits are cast in thither. When 
they are opened, there is an exhalation from them, 
either like that of fire and smoke, such as appears 
in the air from buildings on fire, or like mists and 
thick clouds. I have been told that the infernal 
spirits neither see those things nor are sensible of 
them, because they are in their own atmosphere 
and thus in the delight of their own life." 

"Some hells appeared like caverns in rocks 
tending inward and downward ; some like dens 
which wild beasts inhabit in forests; some like 
arched caverns and holes such as are seen in 
mines. 



208 THE OTHER LIFE. 

"There are also thick forests in which the in- 
fernal spirits wander like wild beasts, and where 
also are subterranean dens into which those can flee 
who are pursued by others. There are also deserts 
where everything is barren and sandy. Into these 
are cast those who in the world have been more 
cunning than others in practicing deceit." 

" In some hells there is an appearance as of ruins 
of houses and cities after fires, in which ruins the 
infernal spirits dwell and conceal themselves. In 
the milder hells there is an appearance of rude cot- 
tages, in some cases contiguous, having the aspect 
of a city with lanes and streets. Within the 
houses are infernal spirits engaged in continual 
quarrels, enmities, blows, and fightings; in the 
streets and lanes robberies and depredations are 
committed." 

This weird region of fantasy and shadow, where 
the light is lurid and ghastly, and the fierce alter- 
nations of heat and cold are terrible, is haunted 
also, by correspondence with the evil shades of its 
inhabitants, by innumerable species of birds and 
beasts of prey and myriads of hideous and venom- 
ous reptiles, which represent outwardly in form 
and character the evil lusts and cruelties of the 



V5 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 209 

heart which is utterly alienated from God and for 
ever divorced from heaven. 

This fearful portion of the spiritual world must 
have, been photographed upon the mind of the 
great poet when he conceived the following lines 
of the Paradise Lost : 

"Through many a dark and dreary vale 
They passed, and many a region dolorous, 
O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, 
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, 
A universe of death, . . . 

Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds 
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, 
Abominable, unutterable, and worse 
Than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived, 
Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire." 

The poet imagines this hell; Swedenborg ex- 
plains it. The devils have rejected that divine 
love and wisdom which create through angelic 
souls the lovely and beautiful things in heaven ; 
therefore they see no cheering and golden sun 
which represents the Lord, no blue ethereal dome, 
no rosy clouds, no rainbows in the. air, no flowers 
upon the earth, no verdure in the fields, 

No mountain-altars tipped with azure fire, 
No far-off glimmer of the emerald seas. 
18* 



210 THE OTHER LIFE. 

And dow comes what seems to the mind trained 
in the current theology the strangest assertion of 
all. This hell is the heaven of evil spirits. These 
direful surroundings to them are beautiful ; these 
horrible associations to them are pleasant; this 
awful life is the one they have chosen for them- 
selves. They would not, if they could, exchange 
their lot for the light of heaven and the bowers of 
bliss. When let alone, when they let others alone, 
when they are not engaged in torturing each other, 
they are happy; It is, however, the happiness of 
the beast in his lair, of the bat in his cave, of the 
serpent in his slime. Such is the lot of those who 
make their bed in hell. 

These are not punishments. God does not pun- 
ish the sinner. The sun never goes down on his 
wrath. He forgives every sin as soon as it is com- 
mitted. The punishment of sin lies in the organic 
law that in sinning you become evil. The wages 
of sin is death — spiritual death. After that, no 
love to God and the neighbor, no knowledge of 
truth, no yearnings for good, no possibility of 
heaven. 

These evil spirits are not tortured by remorse 
of conscience. Conscience implies faith in God, 
respect for his laws, pain at their violation, retro- 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 211 

spection, contrition. So long as a particle of con- 
science remains, so long as conviction of sin and 
feelings of remorse are possible, hell to that soul is 
impossible. Sin destroys the conscience, which is 
simply the pleading voice of God.in the heart. The 
devils have no conscience. They deny God ; they 
deny heaven ; they deny sin. They call evil good, 
the false true. They delight in their wicked lusts 
and passions. They find an infernal delight in 
their hatred, contentions and cruelties. Their mis- 
ery results from the restraints to which their inor- 
dinate desires are necessarily subjected. 

The same inflowing life from God which tends to 
organize everything upon the spiritual principles 
involved in the structure of the Human Form, 
operates in hell as well as iu heaven. Evil spirits, 
as well as good ones, are organized into societies 
related in their spiritual functions or uses to the 
corresponding organs and functions in man. Some 
member of the society speaks for all the rest, so 
that many appear as one devil — "My name is 
Legion, for we are many." The infernal society is 
a deformed Man — a monster. All the hells together 
appear to the Lord, who alone can occupy the infi- 
nite standpoint from which they are visible, under 
the form of a vast monster, the opposite of the 



212 THE OTHER LIFE. 

perfect and sublime Grand Man by which the 
whole heaven is figured. 

This Grand Man of hell, this One representing 
all, was the Devil who tempted our Lord. This is 
the Devil or Satan always meant in the Word of 
God, which in its spiritual sense describes every- 
thing from a divine standpoint. Devils are innu- 
merable. The Devil, as a single evil spirit supreme 
over all others, does not exist. He is a shadow, a 
symbol, a representative figure projected in front 
of us from innumerable similar figures invisible 
behind us. This view furnishes a solution to one 
of the strangest mysteries rising from the literal 
sense of the Scriptures, viz., the doctrine of a per- 
sonal Devil, " archangel ruined," so vast and pow- 
erful as to contend with the Supreme Being for the 
throne of the universe. 

In what occupations are devils, spiritual forms 
of evil and falsity, likely to engage? The will 
ever strives to go forth into act. The delight of 
life is to do and to be what one loves. The delight 
of heaven is to obey the Lord and to do good to 
the neighbor. The delight of hell is the gratifica- 
tion of an evil selfhood and supremacy over the 
neighbor. Harmony is the spirit of heaven. Dis- 
cord is the spirit of hell. The word Satan in its 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 213 

original means enemy, adversary ; devil in the 
original is he that sets at variance. Pleavenly love 
unites all for noble uses. Infernal love scatters 
and repels. All the angels turn to the Lord as 
a common centre ; every evil spirit turns to him- 
self as the centre of the universe and would be 
ruler of all. 

In hell, therefore, no one applies himself to any 
good and useful labor for the benefit of others, 
except under dire compulsion. Each one endeav- 
ors to prey upon others and make them subservient 
to his own ends. Each one despises- others in 
comparison with himself. Strange as it may ap- 
pear, evil spirits delight to inflict sufferings and 
punishments upon all they meet. Their cunning, 
subtlety, cruelty, hatred and spirit of revenge are 
almost incredible. They make war upon each 
other and upon men in the flesh, and would if 
they could destroy the order and peace of heaven 
itself. 

The evil we see upon earth, at which the cheek 
pales and the heart bleeds, is the breath of these 
spirits in hell who flow into the wills and under- 
standings of men, infusing their own hatred and 
false persuasions into all who receive them. The 
wicked man is a kind of automaton moved from 



214 THE OTHER LIFE. 

within by spirits more wicked than himself, spirits 
who cunningly make a vile slave of him and who 
delight in the tortures they inflict upon him, and 
through him upon others. All scenes of drunken- 
ness, theft, obscenity, murder, war and cruelty, are 
places of high revel to these invisible demons, who 
scent from afar the sphere of such things with 
exquisite delight. 

When a good spirit enters heaven he is attracted 
by the force of spiritual affinity to the society which 
is engaged in the performance of the uses that he 
loves best. He is received with joy and tender 
affection. All hearts flow toward him; all minds 
instruct him; all hands are ready to help him. He 
is clad in beautiful garments; conducted to a re- 
splendent home; escorted to feasts of charity and 
love; and, bound to all by the sweet ties of brother- 
hood, he is gradually settled into that niche of 
loving use and joy which he is destined to occupy 
for ever. 

Let Swedenborg tell in his plain and graphic 
manner, the reception which a sinner meets when 
he reaches at last his own place in hell : 

" From every hell there exhales a sphere of the 
lusts in which its inhabitants are. When this 
sphere is perceived by one who is in similar lust he 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 215 

is affected at heart, and is filled with delight; for 
lust and the delight of it are one, since whatever a 
man lusts after is delightful to him. The spirit, 
therefore, turns himself toward the hell whence the 
sphere proceeds, and from delight of heart longs to 
go thither. As yet he knows nothing of the tor- 
ments which exist there ; and, if he did know, he 
would still desire to go ; for in the spiritual world 
no one can resist his own lust, for it belongs to his 
nature, and every one there acts according to his 
nature." 

"When, therefore, a spirit of his own accord or 
from his own freedom, directs his course to his own 
hell and enters it, he is at first received in a friendly 
manner, and is thus led to believe that he is among 
friends. This, however, continues only for a few 
hours. In the mean time he is examined with a 
view to discover the degree of his cunning, and 
thence of his power. When this is ascertained they 
begin to infest him ; and this they do in various 
ways, and with gradually-increasing violence and 
severity. This is done by introducing him more 
interiorly and deeply into hell ; for the spirits are 
more malignant in proportion as the hell they in- 
habit is more interior and deep." 

"After the first infestations they begin to torture 



216 THE OTHER LIFE. 

him with cruel punishments, which they continue 
until he is reduced to the condition of a slave. But 
because rebellious commotions continually exist 
there, for every one in hell desires to be greatest 
and burns with hatred toward others, fresh out- 
rages occur. Thus one miserable scene is changed 
into another. They who are made slaves are taken 
out of their thraldom to assist some new devil in 
subjugating others; when they who refuse to sub- 
mit and to yield implicit obedience are again tor- 
mented in various ways. And this goes on per- 
petually." 

This is a sad picture ; but far more terrible pic- 
tures may be drawn from the pages of Swedenborg. 
They are fearful, painful, but necessary revelations. 
They are not given to frighten men into righteous- 
ness. They are truths which make part of a uni- 
versal psychology, or science of the soul. They 
give us the morbid anatomy or pathology of that 
diseased spiritual state produced by sin. They 
show us what self-love is and what it leads to. 
They make us tremble and look inwardly at our- 
selves, then upward to God. 

Disastrous levity and unbelief prevail in the 
world in regard to the fate of the unregenerate 
soul. Men excuse themselves for their bad pas- 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 217 

sions and rest so contentedly in their false persua- 
sions, that it is hard to convict them of sin at the 
bar of their own consciences, and to make them 
sensible of the awful fact, that their affections and 
thoughts, so far as they are evil and false, are 
already in hell, and felt and shared by the infernal 
spirits or the invisible world. The utter incredu- 
lity as to the everlasting fire threatened in the lite- 
ral sense of the Scriptures, and the vague hope that 
a God of infinite mercy and power will some how 
or other finally save them from the consequences 
of sin, have produced a most culpable indifference 
on the whole subject. There is no point in spiritual 
philosophy on which the old theology is so dark 
and unsatisfactory, and which so urgently needs 
the clear, thorough, convincing and instructive light 
of a new dispensation of truth. 

Great, indeed, are the miseries inflicted by evil 
spirits upon each other. 

"Their highest satisfaction," says Swedenborg, 
" consists in the ability to punish, torture and tor- 
ment one another, which they effect by artifices en- 
tirely unknown in the world, exciting exquisitely 
painful, and, as it were, corporeal sensations, and 
also dire and horrible fantasies, as well as extreme 
alarm and terror, with many other torments. In 

19 K 



218 THE OTHER LIFE. 

this the diabolical crew perceive so much pleasure, 
that were impossible for them infinitely to increase 
and augment these pangs and torments, they would 
still be dissatisfied and burn with a desire to extend 
them ; the Lord, however, frustrates their efforts 
and mitigates the anguish they inflict." 

Few or none upon earth are capable of such ex- 
treme cruelty. Some touch of nature, some voice 
of a better angel, some buried instinct of tenderness 
will make the most degraded beings pause before 
reaching such depths of diabolism. The heavens 
are never utterly closed to men. In hell, however, 
such things are not only possible but inevitable, 
because no one goes to hell until he has been di- 
vested of all the truth and goodness he had known 
or felt on earth, and until he is utterly separated 
from angels and their holy spheres. This process 
is effected by the exploration and judgment of the 
soul in the world of spirits. The nature of that 
judgment and the reason of it are so important in 
a system of theological truth that its consideration 
is reserved for a separate chapter. 

The hells of different kinds of criminals differ 
as widely from each other as the societies of heaven 
differ. Each infernal society is placed opposite to 
some heavenly society, of which its life is the spe- 



HELL: ITS DEL V SIGNS AND MISERIES. 219 

cific corruption or perversion. When the hells are 
in great fermentation they react against the govern- 
ing powers in heaven so forcibly that the light and 
peace of the angels would be sensibly diminished, 
and their influences upon men in the world vastly 
weakened, if the evil spirits were not reduced to 
submission and a kind of dormant state by intense 
suffering and fear. This is meant by il the king- 
dom of heaven suffereth violence." The punish- 
ment is effected by the mere approach of the 
angelic spheres. 

The miseries of hell are therefore threefold. 
First, the self-inflicted miseries which flow from 
the organic state of the soul itself, so that its sur- 
roundings are necessarily wretched and loathsome, 
by the spiritual law of correspondential creation. 
Second, the miseries inflicted by some upon others 
in a thousand subtile and astonishing ways. Third, 
the miseries inflicted by the visitation of angelic 
spheres when it becomes necessary to maintain that 
degree of order and equilibrium upon which the 
stability of the universe depends. 

Observe that these are not the punishments of 
the sins committed in the flesh, but the punishment 
of sins continually being committed on account of 
the organically evil state of the soul. No spirit is 



220 THE OTHER LIFE. 

ever punished for what he did in the world, but 
only for what he is now doing to afflict and destroy 
others. He has indeed acquired by his life in the 
world the peculiar spiritual constitution, the con- 
formations of heart and mind that continually 
impel him to the commission of the evil which 
precipitates him into suffering and punishment. 

A great theological consequence flows from this 
rational and philosophical view of the punishment 
of sin. Christ did not undergo the punishment 
of sin. His work was not to deliver us from the 
effects of sin, but from its power and bondage. 
Effects are only removed by removing their causes. 
Sin is always punished, by the loss of spiritual 
vitality, by the weakening of conscience,- by the 
receding of angelic spheres, by the enveloping 
tyranny of evil. The infliction of pain, physical 
or mental, cannot atone for sin, cannot satisfy the 
offended majesty of the law. This revenge, for it 
is nothing else, is altogether abhorrent to God and 
angels, who instantly forgive every evil thing done 
against them and pity the doer. The small part 
of the miseries of hell for which God may be con- 
sidered responsible, viz., those induced by the visit- 
ation of angelic spheres, is never permitted except 
for the defence of the innocent, the reformation of 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 221 

the offender so far as may be possible, and the re- 
pression of evil; and never, never in the sense of a 
satisfaction to divine justice for outrages committed 
against it. 

In every soul which has a just idea of the love, 
wisdom and power of God, there is an instinctive 
outcry and revolt against the existence of nell, and 
especially against its perpetuity. The traditional 
Church which imposes its incomprehensible dogmas 
upon men as sacred mysteries of faith, gives no sat- 
isfactory answer to the questioning soul. What 
has the New Church to say on the subject? It 
professes to have a thorough, scientific and philo- 
sophical basis, and to see truth by its own light. 
It is especially bound to give a reason for hell and 
its miseries, as it teaches a most miserable and fear- 
ful doom of the unregenerate ; a hell of utterable 
darkness and horror, of excruciating bodily tor- 
ments, of hideous shapes and fantasies, of painful 
alternations of heat and cold, of serpents swarming 
around the terrified spirits and biting them as the 
people were bitten by the serpents in the wilder- 
ness; and a thousand other fearful modes of 
suffering. 

Why does God permit these things to exist ? 

The old theology does not question his power; it 

19 * 



222 THE OTHER LIFE. 

questions his will. He could, if he chose, it tacitly 
says, put an end to all the miseries of hell, release 
the wretched inmates, forgive their sins, illumine 
their minds, purify their hearts and elevate them 
to heaven. Why does He not do so? Oh, they 
have sinned away their day of grace, and must 
endure for ever the fearful punishment of sin. 
Their sentence is just, their sufferings are merited, 
the justice of God is vindicated, and his glory is 
as clearly manifested in the eternal misery of the 
sinner as in the eternal felicity of the saint. 

The New Church, repudiating these doctrines as 
irrational and unscriptural, would rescue theology 
from their baleful influence. It affirms that God 
has no justice which can be outraged and insulted 
by a violation of his laws, and which demands a 
retribution in shape of punishment for sin. Spir- 
itual laws are organic. They are expressions or 
modes of life and are not created. They exist in 
the nature of things, by primal necessity, coinci- 
dently with God himself. God is law. He cre- 
ates and governs man by the laws of his own 
being. There is not one law for God and another 
for man, but the same for both. 

When man violates the divine commandments 
which are the laws of God's life, he does not incur 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 223 

God's displeasure, but excites his pity. He suffers a 
dreadful organic change in his own spiritual nature 
which entails upon him eternal and painful conse- 
quences ; but they are not legal punishments of sin, 
but necessary effects of a cause which he himself 
has put into operation, viz., the turning himself 
away from God so as to receive the influx of his 
life into a perverted and disorderly form. Hell is 
only punishment of sin as a burn is the punish- 
ment for putting your hand in the fire. 

Hell, therefore, is not created by God at all, but 
by man, and it is created through his violations of 
the divine laws. Hell is not governed by any 
other laws or with any other spirit than the laws 
and spirit which prevail in heaven. The miseries 
of hell flow from the influx and operation of the 
laws and spirit of heaven into perverted and disor- 
derly forms. Man changes ; God is unchangeable. 
God gives his bread to all alike, but evil spirits 
turn it into a stone ; fish, but they change it into a 
serpent; flowers, but in evil hands they become 
poisonous weeds. 

If God is not responsible for hell, even in a legal 
sense, why does he not change, suppress, or destroy 
it? 

If the hearts of all the devils could be changed 



224 THE OTHER LIFE. 

and turned in faith and love toward God, hell and 
its wretchedness would disappear. The life and 
laws and forms of heaven would become objective 
there and it would be another heaven. Why does 
God not accomplish this? Because He cannot. 
He cannot forcibly change or compel the will, the 
life, the love, the selfhood of man or spirit. That 
would be to destroy his free-agency, his identity, 
his individuality. At the moment of his creation, 
of his differentiation from God, man acquires this 
free-agency, this spiritual impenetrability, and it 
can never be taken from him. 

Why, then, does God not withdraw his sustain- 
ing life from the hells and let them perish ? 

Because He cannot. He cannot change, for that 
would be to cease to be God. He cannot lie ; He 
cannot violate the laws of His own being ; He can- 
not defraud ; He Cannot commit an act of folly ; 
He cannot cease to love nor to create. The life, 
the breath, the power w T hich flow from Him through 
the universe are one. He cannot divide them, 
giving a little here and a little there, infusing or 
withdrawing as He may choose. He gives all to all ; 
the difference in result is not due to partiality of 
influx, but to differences of reception. He cannot 
withhold life from one sphere and give it to an- 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 225 

other. He would then be present in one and not 
in the other; He would cease to be omnipresent. 
In fine, God could not destroy hell without at the 
same moment destroying heaven and earth. The 
whole universe is bound together in the same infi- 
nite, indissoluble web of life and law. 

Why, then, does not God, infinite in wisdom and 
resources, institute measures for the instruction, dis- 
cipline, reformation and final regeneration of evil 
spirits? His bounty and mercies are lavished upon 
the earth ? Why do they not penetrate the awful 
shadows of the spiritual abyss ? 

The rational mind fails to see why a short pro- 
bationary period here, although neglected and de- 
spised, should be followed by such a direful and 
irrevocable hell. It demands reasons,, not meta- 
physical reasons, not theological fictions, but or- 
ganic reasons for such a result. Organic reasons 
are those which connect the result with all the uni- 
versal laws of life, showing that it is no arbitrary 
enactment, or part of a scheme or plan, but a neces- 
sary and inevitable effect of universal and eternal 
causes. 

How can God communicate with the hells? 

The spirit of God cannot enter into a devil and 

fill him with the divine presence so that He can 

K* 



226 THE OTHER LIFE. 

speak through him as the Angel of Jehovah did to 
the children of Israel. This mode of revelation 
and instruction is not available, for the divine 
sphere would instantly throw the evil spirit into 
such agony that thought would be impossible. In- 
stead of being an inspired oracle he would be at the 
best a raving maniac. 

Divine truth, descending by interior influx and 
dictation into the minds of evil spirits, is turned 
into its opposite falsity. Swedenborg saw this fact 
experimentally proven. The Word of God thus 
passed through the minds of those in hell would be 
written out externally in opposite characters, mak- 
ing it the Book of Hell, as full of hatred and false- 
hood as it really is of love and wisdom. Teaching 
by inspiration is then impossible also. 

Why not send the loving and shining angels to 
them as missionaries of light and peace? The 
sphere of the angels is abhorrent to the devils. 
They would be inflamed with direful animosity at 
their approach, as a den of serpents would rear 
their heads and writhe and hiss and strike at the 
advance of a little child toward them. The influx 
of heavenly light throws them into total darkness ; 
the influx of heavenly love excites their evil pas- 
sions into fearful activity. These things are not 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 227 

accidental or imaginary, but real and organic; 
flowing from laws as fixed and positive as those 
of chemistry or physics. 

Suppose the evil spirits to be made quiescent 
and to listen to what the angels had to say ; what 
impression could be thus made upon them ? The 
angels could speak nothing but spiritual truth, for 
they know nothing else. If this were not changed 
into the opposite, as it would be if flowing into 
their minds by the interior w T ay, it would at least 
be utterly unintelligible. Evil spirits in hell are 
thoroughly sensual. The celestial, spiritual and 
even the rational degrees of the soul are totally 
closed. They think and feel from a standpoint 
far lower than that of men upon the earth. They 
are veritably wild beasts in human form, inaccessi- 
ble to truth, reason and mercy. 

The Word of God interpreted in its lowest and 
most sensuous manner might possibly still reach 
and influence them ; but the literal meaning of the 
Word of God with its sensuous appearances of 
truth, which the natural man takes for real truth, 
is limited to nature, to a world of time and space. 
It was written in nature and in natural forms ; it 
cannot be elevated above nature. It cannot be 
presented in its literal text to beings who are living 



228 THE OTHER LIFE. 

in a state, where time and space have no fixed 
externeity, bat change with the changes of the soul. 

The inhabitants of hell are, therefore, plainly 
out of the reach of the saving influences of God, 
and of the Word of God either spiritual or literal, 
and of the angels and -good spirits. They cannot 
receive truth ; they cannot be drawn by love. 
They can only be controlled by fear, and by fear 
excited by terrible suffering. 

Is this state to be eternal? 

In the spiritual world there are no times and 
spaces such as in ours ; no archives of government, 
no record of events, no historical evolutions. Spirits 
know nothing of time. The spiritual idea of eter- 
nity is not an idea of an interminable succession of 
events, but an idea of fixity or perpetuity of state. 
The question then resolves itself into this ; can the 
state of evil spirits be changed so as to be brought 
into harmony with the laws of heaven ? 

In despair of such a result, seeing no causes at 
work likely to produce it, the benevolent mind, 
intolerant of an eternal hell, indulges the hope 
that the sufferings of the wicked will be terminated 
by a process of gradual annihilation. Swedenborg 
does not teach this doctrine, although some of his 
statements invest it with a little plausibility. He 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 229 

says that some spirits are so far deprived of their 
own evil life by long-continued sufferings, they 
lose their memory and their reflective faculties to 
such an extent, that they do not know they are 
men or that they ever were men. They appear 
imbecile and almost lifeless; sometimes as skele- 
tons sitting solitary in sandy wastes or among stony 
ruins; sometimes as almost formless masses, mere 
ghosts in our view, flickering in dark caverns or 
gliding along the forest shades. It seems that a 
step farther, and they would cease to be. 

Another and more cheering view of this subject, 
not distinctly stated by Swedenborg, but clearly 
deducible from his writings, is, that hell, by means 
of punishment, suffering and discipline, will be 
reduced to such thorough external order and sub- 
mission, that its evils shall become fairly quiescent, 
and its life made to correspond with the sensual- 
corporeal sphere of human life, when it is com- 
pelled to live and act in severe subordination to 
the higher faculties. 

In this state the devils will be under a perfect 
but salutary despotism, compelled to useful labors 
or excited to them by rewards and all the selfish 
motives which animate unregenerate men. They 
will be bound by their own lusts and interests, 

20 



230 THE OTHER LIFE. 

which are those of self and the world, to order, 
peace and useful employments, remaining, how- 
ever, thoroughly unspiritual. 

The possibility of utilizing the utter selfishness 
of the spirit for the public good, is apparent from 
the history of the human race. Men are quite 
willing, for the honors and high places of the 
world, for the delights and pleasures of sense, to 
control their evil passions so far as to display an 
outward civility and apparent good feeling for the 
neighbor. Splendid civilizations indeed may be 
built up, even churches may be made to flourish, 
with no basis of motive for the whole work but 
utter selfishness, intense ambition and the love of 
glory or power. 

That acute and original thinker, Henry James, 
was evidently contemplating such an amelioration 
of the hells when he penned the following para- 
graph : 

" I have not the slightest idea of hell as a tran- 
sitory implication of human destiny, as an ex- 
hausted element of human progress. On the con- 
trary, I conceive that the vital need of human 
freedom exacts its eternal perpetuity. I admit, 
nay I insist, that the devil is fast becoming and 
will one day be a perfect gentleman ; that he will 



HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES. 231 

wholly unlearn his nasty tricks of vice and crime, 
and become a model of sound morality, infusing 
an unwonted energy into the police department, 
and inflating public worship with an unprecedented 
pomp and magnificence. Otherwise I cannot un- 
derstand how the Lord, with a full knowledge of 
the character and tendencies of Judas Iscariot, yet 
chose him into the number of the sacred twelve, 
and entrusted him with the provision of his and 
their material welfare. But the gentleman is infi- 
nitely short of the MAN ; and however gentlemanly 
the devil will infallibly grow, there he will stop, and 
leave the sacred heights of manhood unattained." 

Hell, even at its worst, exercises a vast use to 
men, a most important and direct aid in our re- 
generation. Our own evil loves, hereditary and 
acquired, connect us organically with its deepest 
recesses. We cannot be extricated from this spirit- 
ual abyss, unless we are made conscious of our 
being there ; unless we see ourselves as interiorly 
evil and corrupt ; and unless we are driven to the 
Lord and the Word by strong conviction of sin, a 
fearful sense of its overwhelming power over us, 
and of our own utter helplessness against its direful 
assaults. This is effected by the influx of hell into 
our interiors, when our secret evil and falsehood 



232 THE OTHEB. LIFE. 

are stirred up and made active, when we are led 
into dreadful temptation, and spiritual doubt and 
despair, out of which we are finally delivered by 
the Lord. Our heavenly Father thus utilizes the 
devils to the utmost, and turns to some good use 
every evil thing they inflict upon us. 

This amelioration of the hells can only be pos- 
sible after the thorough regeneration of men upon 
earth. When all men in the flesh react against 
evil spirits just as the angels do in heaven, the 
powers of hell will have no corresponding ultimate 
upon earth ; and they must either be annihilated, 
or reduced into external correspondence with the 
lowest sphere of human life, which is neither spir- 
itual nor rational, but sensual and corporeal. There 
they may find rest and peace. 

It is a happy and ennobling thought, that he 
who performs a single good deed from a pure 
motive, contributes his little mite, not only to the 
salvation of his own soul, but to the order and 
beauty of the world, to the strength and glory of 
heaven, to the amelioration and repose of hell, and 
to the final reign of eternal peace ! 



CHAPTER X. 

THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 

11 HE world of spirits is an intermediate state 
- of existence with its corresponding object- 
ive phenomena, into which all men are ushered 
immediately after death, by the process of the 
resurrection, which is only the withdrawal of the 
spiritual body from the natural. The state is 
intermediate between heaven and hell. Men are 
called splits w T hile living in that world ; angels, 
if they pass into heaven ; devils, if they direct 
their steps to hell. Heaven, hell and the world 
of spirits constitute together the spiritual world. 

This is the sheol of the Old Testament, the hades 
of the New ; erroneously translated in our English 
Bibles, hell and the grave ; and known by tradition 
as " the place of departed spirits." ' 

It is strange that Protestant Christianity has lost 
the knowledge of this intermediate state, and that 
its acute thinkers and biblical students have not 
re-discovered and proclaimed it. 

20 * 233 



234 THE OTHER LIFE. 

The idea of an intermediate state in which souls 
are kept for judgment, previous to entering heaven 
or hell, is to be found in the most ancient mytholo- 
gies and philosophies. 

It was a current doctrine with the Jews. Jose- 
phus expressly defines the word sheol, which our 
translators render hell, as " that place wherein the 
souls of the righteous and of the unrighteous are 
detained." 

It was universally accepted as an article of 
rational faith in the Christian church until the time 
of the Protestant reformation. 

Dr. Jung Stilling, in his " Theory of Pneuma- 
tology," affirms : 

"The universal Christian world from the very 
commencement, believed in an invisible world of 
spirits, which was divided into three different 
regions : heaven, or the place of the blessed ; hell, 
or the place of torment; and then a third place, 
which the Bible calls hades, or the receptacle for 
the dead, in which those souls which are not ripe 
for either destination, are fully prepared for that to 
which they have adapted themselves in this life." 

The only theory which can account for the man- 
ner in which the scriptural doctrine of an interme- 
diate state has been ignored by Protestant theology, 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 235 

is, that it was done to counteract as much as pos- 
sible the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory. 
The perversions of truth on this subject, calculated 
to extend the spiritual dominion of the Catholic 
clergy and to augment the revenues of the church, 
were so revolting to reason and so dangerous to 
society, that the reactionary spirit carried the Re- 
formers to the extreme of dropping from their creed 
an article of faith, which was necessary to a proper 
understanding of what the Scriptures teach about 
the spiritual world. 

If there is no intermediate state or life, the soul 
must go consciously into heaven or hell after death, 
which is a practical judgment upon it, rendering 
useless the formal judgment which is expected at 
the last day. Or it must remain for ages in a state 
of unconsciousness or insensibility, which is an idea 
utterly unscriptural. 

" This day," said our Lord to the penitent thief, 
" thou shalt be with me in paradise." 

Leaving the theologians to adjust these difficul- 
ties as they please, or to learn the genuine truth 
from the excellent works of Hayden and Rendell 
on the last judgment, I shall endeavor to prove the 
existence and uses of the world of spirits from a 
different and more interior standpoint. 



236 THE OTHER LIFE. 

Heaven and hell are extremes ; they are antip- 
odal, antagonistic states of the spirit. All in 
heaven are good, all in hell are evil. They have 
attained their final states by the separation of the 
good from the evil, of the true from the false, so 
that there is an impassable gulf fixed between them. 
The introduction of anything good into hell, or of 
anything evil into heaven would produce confusion 
of mind, disorder, and pain in either sphere. 

Millions of human beings die every week and 
pass into the spiritual world. They are generally in 
states of mixed good and evil. There are few men 
so regenerate that the searching light of heaven will 
not discover some dark corners in their minds and 
some evil spot in their hearts ; few so reprobate, 
but they have some invisible chord in the spirit 
which can be attuned to heavenly music. The vast 
majority of men are mixtures of good and evil 
blended in apparently inextricable confusion. 

Now man wakes from his death-sleep into the 
spiritual world the same as he was when he lay 
down to die. The mere act of death produces no 
change in the affections, thoughts, opinions, aspira- 
tions, appetites or habits. No religious exercises, 
no prayers or faith can instantaneously change evil 
into good. There is no sudden transformation of 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 237 

a sinner into a Christian or of a Christian into an 
angel. Such an idea is a theological fiction without 
basis in reason or Scripture; and he who trusts to 
it will be fearfully deceived. 

When a man rises from the dead — that is, when 
his spiritual body is extricated from his physical 
form, the laws of the spiritual world instantaneously 
operate upon him. He comes into the exercise of 
spiritual thought. He speaks spontaneously the 
rich and wonderful language of spirits. The objects 
around him have no extern eity independent of him, 
but they are the interior things of his own spirit 
presented in visible forms as a world outside of 
him. 

This newly-risen spirit cannot instantly enter 
heaven. Why? Because his spiritual states of 
affection and thought do not accord with those of 
the angels. He could neither see what they saw 
nor hear what they heard. If it were possible for 
him, without the necessary changes of state or the 
intervention of intermediate spirits, to be placed 
suddenly and bodily in the midst of a heavenly 
society, what would result? He would be a dis- 
cord in their assembly, a blot in their sky, a source 
of pain and terror. They would tremble at the 
sphere of his evil thoughts and desires. His life 



238 THE OTHER LIFE. 

would project itself outwardly around them in ter- 
rible or disgusting forms, black clouds in the sky, 
dark caverns in the earth, lurid fires in the dis- 
tance, serpents or toads or obscene birds. Heaven 
would be rent as with an earthquake. Such a thing 
is therefore organically impossible. 

Neither can the new-comer from earth go at once 
into hell. He bears with him some traces of good- 
ness and truth, some touch of kindness, some rem- 
nant of humanity, which would produce similar 
disorder in the infernal sphere. It would be like 
the approach of an angel to the hells, when dark- 
ness comes over them, and terror seizes them and 
frightful pains lay hold of them. 

The new-comer himself would be more dread- 
fully tortured by the experiment than either the 
angels or the devils. The sphere of heaven would 
be intolerable to the evil elements, and the sphere 
of hell equally so to the good elements in his 
nature. Between the two conflicting elements he 
would be torn asunder with sufferings far more 
severe than he would experience in the hell suited 
to his evils when they have been isolated from all 
his better life. 

It is plain that the law of spiritual relation — 
namely, that the objective world springs up in cor- 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 239 

respondence with the subjective states of the spirit, 
demands and effects the total separation of good 
and evil spheres, so that heaven and hell stand 
eternally apart. This separation is gradually ef- 
fected in the world of spirits. It is called in 
Scripture the judgment. 

The world of spirits is therefore created, just as 
heaven and hell are created. It is to outward 
appearance a vast world, not fixed in time and 
space like our material orbs, but plastic and change- 
able to the outflowing thoughts and affections of its 
inhabitants. It appears differently to different 
classes or societies of spirits, and external objects 
come and go, appear and disappear, are created or 
annihilated in correspondence with the spiritual 
panorama which is passing in the interiors of the 
souls of those who live there. 

The form which this world of spirits assumes to 
men recently deceased is very much like that of the 
world they have left. The reason is that they are 
still in possession of their exterior memory, thoughts, 
affections and life ; for man has an external and an 
internal life which are frequently very different. 
Newly-arrived spirits think from their memories 
of time and space, reason from the sensuous ap- 
pearances which dominated their intellects in this 



240 THE OTHER LIFE. 

life, and act from external motives as they did 
here. 

The consequence is that they at first build up 
around themselves, by the law of spiritual crea- 
tion, things similar to those they had known and 
loved in the earth-life. They collect together in 
nationalities, are divided according to their religious 
opinions, and have civil cliques and social coteries 
just as we do here. The external world around 
them is somewhat similar to that they have left 
behind. The English have some spiritual counter- 
part of their London, the French of their Paris, 
the Italians of their Rome. They are concerned 
about what they shall do and how they shall live. 
They manifest the spirit of trade, the lust of office, 
the zeal for science, and have the same loves and 
appetites and opinions there as they had here. It 
is difficult for the new-comers into that extraordi- 
nary world to believe that they are dead to the 
world of nature and living in a world of spirits. 

All this, however, is transitory. The population 
is ever shifting. Millions appear every week on 
this new field of action, where good and evil spirits 
are contending for the supremacy over man, but as 
many disappear as come. They do not die. What 
has become of them ? No one sees them go away ; 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 241 

no one can follow them ; but millions weekly (to 
speak in a temporal manner) disappear from the 
sight and thought of those who remain behind. 
Where are they ? 

They have gone away into heaven or hell. A 
great change has come over them. Their exterior 
spiritual life has been taken away from them or 
made quiescent. Their interior natures have come 
out to view. They no longer have two faces. 
They no longer think one thing and say another. 
All external bonds and restraints are removed, for- 
gotten, despised. There is no fear of the law, or 
of public opinion, no influence of fashion, no con- 
ventionalisms, no respect for wealth or position, no 
sacrifices to decorum, no concealment from inter- 
ested motives. The man or the woman stands out 
in - utter spiritual nakedness, every thought, every 
feeling exposed to view, everything which had been 
whispered in the ear in closets proclaimed on the 
house-tops ! 

With this change from the exterior to the inte- 
rior of the spiritual life, a corresponding change 
occurs in their external surroundings. The shadowy 
London and Paris of the external man disappear ; 
nationalities are lost for ever; churches are gone; 
outward organizations are nothing; conventional- 

21 L 



242 THE OTHER LIFE. 

isms perish ; their own names and history are for- 
gotten as shadows not worth a thought. Their 
qualities alone survive. From them they love, 
think, feel, see, live. 

When the exterior mind is thus closed in a good 
spirit, he is led by angels into places of instruction. 
He is there divested of all his errors of opinion 
and taught the truths of heaven which he receives 
with inexpressible delight. Soon he discovers 
some Avay or road invisible to others, some way 
overarched with flowers and fragrant with odors 
and flagged with precious stones and brilliant 
with a great light, a way that leads him upward 
and onward into the heavenly society for which 
he is now prepared and where he will live for 
ever. 

The interiorly evil spirit, however, does not go 
to any place of instruction. In his conceit of supe- 
rior wisdom he refuses it ; in his aversion to spirit- 
ual truth, he abhors it. The exteriors of the world 
of spirits disappear also from his vision, and he 
seeks those whose interior life and loves are similar 
to his own. He also discovers a road or way in- 
visible to others, but it is a dark cleft between 
frowning rocks, a downward path, pervaded by 
horrible stenches and overhung by lurid vapors, 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 243 

and he treads it eagerly with the delight of an 
obscene bird flying to a dark wood where the car- 
cass of some wild beast is lying. He finds himself 
at last in some one of the hells which are opposite 
to the societies of heaven. 

What is the cause of these remarkable phenom- 
ena? 

The judgment : " It is appointed unto all men 
to die, and after this the judgment." 

Yes, these spirits have been judged. The books 
have been opened, and they have been judged out 
of them and " according to their works." The 
sheep have been separated from the goats. Those 
who had oil in their lamps have gone into the 
marriage-feast, and against those who had none the 
door has been shut. Those who had used their 
talents wisely, have had their spiritual riches indef- 
initely increased ; those who had buried their gift 
in the earth, have been stripped of all and cast 
into outer darkness. 

There are two judgments : a special or individual 
judgment for each soul, and a general judgment 
which takes place at the end of every Church, or 
at the close of every Dispensation. These pro- 
cesses occur always in the world of spirits; not in 
heaven, nor in hell, nor upon the earth. The great 



244 THE OTHER LIFE. 

work and use 'of the intermediate state is the 
judgment. 

What is the judgment ? 

Our ideas on this matter, drawn from civil asso- 
ciations, are wholly erroneous. Our mind's eye 
sees a tribunal, a judge empowered to pass sen- 
tence, an array of witnesses, evidence given and 
substantiated, the scales of justice produced, the 
balance struck, the sentence pronounced according 
to law, and finallv executed. 

Nothing of this happens in the judgments of the 
spiritual world. Judgment is the preparation of 
the soul for heaven or for hell, by the separation 
of the good from the evil and the true from the 
false in all the constituent elements of the life and 
character. It is an unfolding of the ruling love, a 
revelation of the inmost life and abiding qualities 
of the spirit. From the good, all the evil and 
false things derived from their earth-life, adherent 
but not inherent, are taken away, so that they be- 
come thoroughly good and fit for heaven. From 
the evil, all the apparent goodness and truth they 
possess, adherent also but not inherent, are taken 
away, and they become thoroughly evil and can 
live nowhere but in hell. 

Hear the Word : 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 245 

" Unto every one that hath shall be given, and 
he shall have abundance; but from him that hath 
not, shall be taken away even that which he 
hath." 

And again : 

" I would thou wert cold or hot. So then be- 
cause thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, 
I will spue thee out of my mouth." 

Yes, we must be either one thing or the other, 
utterly good or utterly evil. Judgment is separa- 
tion ; the separation of good and evil spirits, and 
the separation of good and evil elements in the 
individual spirit. No evil passions, no false opin- 
ions, no unruly tempers, no frailties, no petty faults, 
no thorn in the flesh, will cleave to the good man, 
who has set his face steadfastly toward the great 
Sun of the spiritual universe. On the other hand, 
no suavities of manner, no redeeming traits, no 
generous qualities, no flashes of wit or wisdom, no 
love of parents or children or country, will remain 
with the man whose self-love and love of the world 
have been so great as to give the preponderance of 
evil to his nature. 

How is this judgment effected? 

By the light of heaven, which is divine truth, 
and through the mediation of angels. This divine 

21 * 



246 THE OTHER LIFE. 

truth is the Son of man who comes in all his glory, 
having the holy angels with him. 

The world of spirits is very populous ; far more 
so than our earth, over which it hangs like a vast 
spiritual cloud hiding the light of heaven, not only 
from our natural but also from our spiritual eyes. 
Not only are the dead of a whole generation there, 
but angels from heaven and evil spirits from hell 
in great numbers. Our own attendant spirits, 
good and evil, are there ; our guardian spirits who 
befriend and guide us, and our evil spirits who 
assault and tempt and accuse us night and day. 
This vast multitude which no man can number, is 
under the government of angels, who are engaged 
in organizing and reorganizing the various elements 
into different societies, so as to detect the organic 
spiritual affinities of each, individual and to give 
full play to the ruling love which finally determines 
his abode. 

" In the beginning God created the heavens and 
the earth." 

He did not create hell nor the world of spirits. 
They sprang into being as necessities, caused by the 
voluntary perversion of divine order by man. If 
the earth was perfect and all men lived and thought 
like angels, the heavens could rest upon the earth, 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 247 

like the upper stories of a house upon its founda- 
tions, and at death no intermediate state would be 
necessary, but men could pass instantaneously to 
their proper places in heaven. 

The world of spirits performs a great use by 
intervening between our world and heaven and 
hell. If the heavens flowed immediately into our 
evil and corrupted natures, we should be tortured 
as the devils are at the approach of angelic spheres. 
If the hells flowed directly into us, the last remains 
of our spiritual life would be suffocated and we 
should be turned into beasts. That fearful danger 
really impended when God manifested himself in 
the flesh, to contend, by his divine sphere or Holy 
Spirit, against all the hells, and thus to rescue 
mankind from spiritual death. 

The world of spirits acts as a great breakwater, 
saving us from a spiritual deluge, as a vast cloud 
protecting us alike from the light of heaven which 
would blind and from the fire of hell which would 
destroy us. By the arrangement of forces in that 
world, the adjustment of equilibriums, the Lord 
maintains the free-agency of man, and secures that 
freedom of will and thought which is requisite for 
regeneration. k 

Societies in the world of spirits are arranged 



248 THE OTHER LIFE. 

according to the good or evil passions of the soul. 
Each one is a centre of attraction to all the similar 
elements which exist in the interior life of those 
who approach. The spheres emanating from them 
are very powerful. A soul undergoing judgment 
is conducted from one to another, and if there is 
any similar good or evil in him, he is filled with 
delight and wishes to stay with his newly-found 
friends. It may be a transitory connection, such 
as the chemists would call a feeble combination, 
and the spirit will pass on to other societies for 
which he feels a stronger affinity. 

In this manner the good and evil in the soul are 
brought to the surface. Good men who have evils 
still clinging to them, associate with these evil 
spheres until their own evils are fully exposed to 
view, and until by the reaction of the good ele- 
ments and by repentance, mortification, prayers 
and even sufferings, they are delivered from them 
and extricated by the superior attraction of the 
angelic societies. Evil men are brought in a sim- 
ilar manner into contact with good spheres ; and at 
first they may appear like angels of light, but their 
goodness and truth being merely superficial, fade 
away, or are put off, and they escape as from a 
prison and betake themselves eagerly to those soci- 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 249 

eties which are in fullest sympathy with their own 
evil lusts. 

Searching are the methods, inexorable the pro- 
cesses and fearful the revelations of the world of 
spirits. Double-dealing is detected : the hypocrite 
unmasked ; the false prophet exposed ; and the 
soul without a wedding-garment is cast out from 
the feast. On the other hand, the good are deliv- 
ered from temptation and trial, restored to spiritual 
sight and hearing, released, strengthened, comforted, 
purified ; and the souls under the altar groaning 
for deliverance, are lifted into heaven. 

And all this is done without infringing upon the 
free-agency of any spirit, without any compulsion, 
without any violence. The good go into heaven 
and the evil into hell of their own accord ; the 
former like birds released from the hand, that soar 
away into the blue sky, or nestle among the green 
leaves ; the latter like serpents that glide stealthily 
down into the darkest holes of the earth, hiding 
from the light of God. 

These wonderful operations going on in the 
world of spirits are of immeasurable importance 
to us. They are not far off like the historical 
events of some distant planet. They are immedi- 
ately over and around us ; yea they are within us. 

t, * 



250 THE OTHER LIFE. 

Every society, every individual in that world is a 
centre of influx and a focus of attraction to men in 
this. Our very life flows to us through them, and 
it is colored and changed and ennobled or per- 
verted according to the media through which it 
has passed. We are insensibly following our good 
and evil spirits in their movements, and repeating 
their experiences every day of our lives. We are 
nearing the heaven or the hell to which they are 
going, and putting off the evil or the good as they 
do. We cannot serve two masters; we must choose 
between them. 

People who think there is to be an end of the 
world and a general judgment day for all who have 
ever lived on earth, and who locate the theatre of 
that judgment in the clouds or within the realm 
of nature, and. see no absurdity in such a belief, 
are unwilling to entertain the more rational doc- 
trine, that the judgment is a spiritual process, en- 
tirely out of and above nature, which occurs in an 
intermediate state or world of spirits. 

Such persons have derived their ideas from a 
sensuous interpretation of the symbolical language 
of prophecy. In that language the end of one 
Dispensation or Church is always described as the 
end of the world or the consummation of the age, 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 251 

and the dawn of a new Dispensation as the coming 
of the Lord to judgment. 

A strong array of evidence in support of this 
view might be drawn from Scripture, but a single 
passage is sufficient ; for that is so clear and posi- 
tive as to carry conviction to the most doubting 
mind. 

The prophet Joel predicts that the time will 
come when there will be wonders in the heavens 
and on the earth, blood and fire and pillars of 
smoke; that the heavens shall tremble, and the 
sun be turned into darkness and the ' moon into 
blood, and the stars withdraw their shining. These 
things are very similar to those which the New 
Testament predicts about the last judgment and 
the second coming of the Lord. Now the apostle 
Peter, preaching on the day of Pentecost the 
death and resurrection of Jesus, quotes this very 
passage from the prophet Joel, and assures his 
hearers that the prophecy was then and there ful- 
filled. Peter's mind was illumined to see that 
the prophetical language described the passing 
away of an old system and the inauguration of a 
new. 

The world is the Church, the cosmos, the system 
of order and beauty, which having become cor- 



252 THE OTHER LIFE. 

rupted, ends or perishes, while a new earth and a 
new heaven take its place. Does not Paul say, 
"Now once in the end of the world hath He ap- 
peared to put away sin?" Did the world of 
nature come to an end in the time of Paul ? 

So Swedenborg declares that the Church has 
come to an end ; that the apostolic Church is con- 
summated ; the Dispensation ended ; that prophecy 
is fulfilled ; that the last judgment has taken place; 
that the Lord has come again in the clouds of 
heaven with all his holy angels. 

When you understand what he means by these 
things which appear so improbable, so impossible 
to the natural man, the light which illumined the 
mind of Peter will illumine yours, and you will 
see that the Word of God is not to be interpreted 
literally but spiritually ; and that the end of the 
world or consummation of the age, the second 
coming of the Lord, the resurrection, the judg- 
ment, the descent of the New Jerusalem, are spir- 
itual events which take place in the world.of spirits; 
and are known in the material world only by the. 
effects they produce upon the minds and hearts of 
men. 

In the chapter on hell and its miseries it was 
stated, that whenever a society in hell reacted too 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 253 

violently against the antipodal or antagonistic 
society in heaven, so as to break the equilibrium 
or orderly arrangement which secures the peace of 
the angels and the free-agency of men, it is reduced 
and held within bounds by a special descent or 
visitation of the divine truth. This is the princi- 
ple involved in the general judgments now to be 
described. They are visitations of the angels de- 
scending into the world of spirits with the Divine 
Sphere or Truth acting through them. They come 
to separate the evil from the good, to select the 
wheat from the tares, to break up and disperse the 
congregated powers of evil and falsehood, and to 
let in a new and blessed light from heaven. 

Under the past dispensations and for reasons too 
abstruse to be detailed in this place, the Lord per- 
mitted the spirits who were in mixed states of good 
and evil, and especially those who had been in 
possession of the divine truths of the church, but 
had not lived a life according to them, to remain 
for many centuries in the world of spirits. They 
framed governments ecclesiastical and civil for 
themselves; and so infatuated were they with their 
own supposed goodness and wisdom, that they 
called their spiritual surroundings heaven. This 
was the heaven that fled away or departed like a 

22 



254 THE OTHER LIFE. 

flaming scroll at the judgment; for it cannot be 
supposed that the heaven of angels, the home of 
the blessed, the throne of God can ever be shaken 
or destroyed. 

Vast multitudes of men under all these dispen- 
sations were so good that they passed readily into 
heaven ; and vast multitudes were so evil that they 
threw themselves speedily into hell, under the 
special judgment or process of separation already 
described. The residue constituted a mighty power 
of evil and falsity, resting like a vast incubus upon 
the minds of men on earth and reacting with dis- 
turbing aggressiveness against the bright and lov- 
ing forces of heaven. When this state reached its 
climax, when the fullness of time was come, there 
was a visitation of Divine Truth, and a terrible 
judgment accomplished by the angels. 

These judgments in the world of spirits were no 
doubt attended by the striking and awful phenom- 
ena described by the prophets; for the symbols 
employed in Scripture are the veritable forms and 
realities of the spiritual world. The heavens fled 
away ; the sea disappeared ; the sun was darkened ; 
their apparently external nature was convulsed; 
there was fire, and blood and smoke; cities were 
overwhelmed; the earth yawned; and the rocks and 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 255 

mountains fell upon the condemned spirits who fled 
in terror from an exhibition of what they considered 
"the wrath of God." 

These sublime and terrible scenes, which the lit- 
eralist is vainly expecting to occur in our natural 
world,, have already taken place four times in the 
world of spirits, the only possible theatre of judg- 
ment. 

The first church instituted by God extended 
from Adam to Noah. Of its peculiarities, its suc- 
cessive changes, and its fate, Swedenborg is the 
only historian. They are narrated in the spiritual 
sense of the first ten chapters of Genesis. The per- 
versions of truth and the moral corruptions toward 
the close of that antediluvian dispensation, must 
have been terrible indeed ; for the judgment exe- 
cuted upon it in the world of spirits is described 
symbolically as a great flood which destroyed the 
whole world. 

The second church extended from Noah to Abra- 
ham. Its judgment is described representatively 
by the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah. The 
real cause of that catastrophe and of many others, 
no doubt, that occurred in the world about that 
time, was the judgment executed in the world of 
spirits on the expiring church, and the iuaugura- 



256 THE OTHER LIFE. 

tion of an entirely new dispensation of which 
Abraham was the leader. 

The third or Jewish church extended from Abra- 
ham to Christ, when, like the others, it was con- 
summated and judged and its abused talents taken 
from it and given to another. 

That Christ executed a great judgment in the 
world of spirits at his first advent, is a fact of stu- 
pendous value — a fact, strange to say, not fully 
known or understood in the Christian church. All 
the prophecies of the Old Testament culminated in 
Christ. They were all fulfilled in Him. The most 
of them allude to the judgments. executed by him. 

The judgment described by the prophets was 
executed by Him in the world of spirits, on the resi- 
due of the Jewish church, who still lingered in the 
intermediate state — the good being detained there 
by the wicked, and the wicked assaulting both 
heaven and earth from that favorable standpoint. 
It was there that David was detained until Christ 
came; for the Apostle Peter declares that in his 
own day, David, a thousand years deceased, had not 
yet ascended into heaven. It was there that Christ 
preached to the souls in prison, and released them 
from their bondage to infesting evils and falsities, 
and took them with Him into heaven. 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 257 

John the Baptist, preaching Christ to the people, 
declares to them this great judgment, which no one 
will pretend to say Christ executed in the natural 
world : 

" Whose fan is in his hand, and He will thor- 
oughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into 
the garner; but He will burn up the chaff with 
unquenchable fire." 

Christ himself declares that He was fulfilling this 
great mission of the Divine Truth : 

" Now is the judgment of this world ; now shall 
the prince of this world be cast out." 

"The prince of this world is judged." 

" I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." 

This clearing of the world of spirits by a grand 
process of judgment or separation, was absolutely 
necessary to the successful preaching and conquests 
of the new gospel. It was an essential part of the 
mission of Jesus in his incarnation. It was the 
primal cause why the old order of thought and life 
perished; why the oracles became dumb; why 
paganism disappeared ; why the Roman empire 
declined ; why the ancient languages and literature 
became extinct. It was indeed the pivotal and 
turning-point in human history; and the philos- 
ophy of history can never be truly understood 

22 * 



258 THE OTHER LIFE. 

until the changes in the world of spirits are recog- 
nized as the great motor powers in human life. 

The Christian world lives under the delusion 
that the Church founded by the apostles is to be 
perpetual. Its gradual corruption, its end and its 
judgment were all predicted by Christ himself; 
and its interior or spiritual history, its perversion 
of truth, its schisms, its great Catholic and Prot- 
estant heresies, its destruction and its judgment, 
are all described with the utmost minuteness in the 
spiritual sense of the Apocalypse. This astound- 
ing event occurred in the world of spirits, the 
sheol of the Old Testament, the hades of the New, 
in the year 1757 ; and one human being, whose 
spiritual sight and hearing were at the time opened 
into the spiritual world, was a witness o^'all the 
accompanying phenomena. 

That witness was Emanuel Swedenborg. 

The judgment executed by the Lord in the world 
of spirits at his first advent, delivered the human 
mind from the accumulated shadows of many cen- 
turies, and let in the light of heaven in such a 
manner that the old religions, the old philosophies, 
the old arts and sciences, the old governments, the 
old principles of life and thought were greatly 
modified or ceased to exist ; and the Divine Word, 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 259 

no longer limited to one nation, became the her- 
itage of all, and the central Sun of our modern 
civilization. 

The last judgment executed in the world of 
spirits in the year 1757, was another grand disso- 
lution of the accumulated shadows of many centu- 
ries; and it is the true and efficient cause of the 
stupendous changes which have occurred during 
the last hundred years, and the secret spring of the 
still more extraordinary events which are impend- 
ing. The Divine Word is now spiritually opened, 
which is equivalent to the second coming of the 
Lord ; and its spiritual light will be the centre of a 
purer and more brilliant civilization than has ever 
yet dawned upon the race. 

The last century has exceeded all the others since 
the time of Christ, in the development of arts and 
sciences, in the spread of liberty and liberal princi- 
ples, in the diffusion of knowledge, in the elevation 
of the masses, in the amelioration of evils, in the 
organization of charities; in material prosperity, 
literary power and artistic splendor ; in the activ- 
ities of free thought ; in culture and refinement ; in 
the renunciation of error and the discovery of truth. 

What is the cause of these things ? Some spon- 
taneous and accidental outburst of mental activity 



260 THE OTHER LIFE. 

in the race? Effects are never spontaneous or 
accidental, but always the legitimate products of 
efficient causes. Were they the fruit of the seed 
which was planted by the philosophy and theology 
of the Middle Ages? No. They sprang into 
being when the hereditary incubus of the Middle 
Ages was lifted from the human mind. How 
was it lifted? By the judgment in the world of 
spirits, which sent all the old kings and priests and 
nobles and knights and philosophers and leaders 
of thought in every department, to heaven or to 
hell according to their interior natures. When 
their spheres w T ere removed from the world of 
spirits, they were removed also from the minds of 
men ; and these latter acquired greater freedom and 
activity of thought from the new light descending 
out of heaven. 

This is why so many rapid changes are taking 
place ; why the world progresses so fast ; why the 
old landmarks are forsaken ; why the old appeals 
to the traditions of the fathers and to the authority 
of great names are ineffectual ; why revolutions in 
government, science and religion are so frequent 
and general that few thinking men have arrived at 
middle age without having changed their opinions 
and shifted their positions. The conservatives of 



THE WORLD OF SPIRITS. 261 

the present day would have been extreme radicals 
in the past; and the radicals of the present will 
occupy conservative ground when an extreme radi- 
calism shall be pressing in advance of future gen- 
erations. 

Not only the men from our earth who lingered in 
the world of spirits until 1757 are judged, but the 
principles which actuated them, the motives, the life, 
the thoughts, all the spiritual causes which created 
and perpetuated the civilization of the past. What- 
ever was false and baneful in them was cast out, so 
that they might no longer crush or impede or per- 
vert the human soul. The divine right of kings ; 
the sentiment of caste; the feudal spirit; the pleas 
for slavery ; the infallibility of men or institutions; 
the superstitions of all ; the metaphysical absurd- 
ities ; the theological dogmas which held the mind 
in bondage ; the evil training and the false educa- 
tion; the false prophets and false Christs; those 
perversions of the meaning of God's Word which 
darken the understanding and betray the soul ; all 
these and a thousand other ruling loves and ideas 
of the past have been judged and cast out for ever 
from the world of spirits. Evil spirits and mis- 
guided and frequently good men will struggle hard 
to retain something of the old life and its forms, 



262 THE OTHER LIFE. 

and to perpetuate them "on the earth. They fight 
against the inevitable. 

The transition from the old to the new will be 
fearful, painful and difficult. With larger liberty 
comes larger license ; with freedom for good, free- 
dom also for evil. Chaos will impend. It will be 
only the chaos, however, which precedes a new 
creation — a new heaven and a new earth. A new 
light is streaming from the uncreated Word ; and 
the Divine Man, one in person and spirit, shall 
reign with perpetual blessings in the new Paradise 
of our race. 



CHAPTER XI. 

WHY ARE THESE THINGS NOT BELIEVED? 

THE theo-philosophy of Swedenborg is the most 
beautiful, comprehensive and perfect system 
ever presented to man. It is the only system in 
the world which is based upon the Word of God, 
and claims to have been derived from heaven. The 
claim itself is so stupendous as to paralyze curiosity 
by exciting suspicion of insanity in the man who 
makes it. 

" He is mad !" exclaimed the leaders ; and for a 
whole century the church turned its face away from 
the great light which is to illumine and gladden it 
for ever. 

But readers and believers are found. The strange 
doctrines pass into all countries, like the seed of 
heavenly fruit, borne by the four angels who hold 
the four winds of the earth ; and already they are 
received and loved and lived by thousands of earn- 
est, intelligent and practical men. 

" There was method in his madness !" suggest 
the defenders of the old faith. 

263 



264 THE OTHER LIFE. 

" Was he mad at all !" asks some independent 
thinker, who has been delighted with the doctrine 
of correspondences, and the wonderful result of its 
application to the abstrusest problems in philosophy 
and science. 

" He was the messenger of God !" murmurs the 
Christian who has seen the spiritual sense of the 
Divine Word break forth in dazzling splendor from 
his pages. 

These questions may not be settled to every one's 
satisfaction within the next century. But in less 
than half that time the popular estimate of Sweden- 
borg and his teachings will be very different from 
what it now is. Why are his disclosures not ac- 
cepted now? When this philosophy and theology 
of the angels is presented to intelligent and Chris- 
tian men, scientists, philosophers and theologians, 
all earnestly engaged in the study of or search 
after truth, why is it not immediately recognized 
and acknowledged ? 

Something else is needed for the recognition of 
truth besides its mere presentation. 

Our question will be readily answered by recall- 
ing some of the profound psychological truths 
which Swedenborg himself has given us. 

A man's love is his life. The delight which he 



WHY ARE THESE THINGS NOT BELIEVED! 265 

feels in the exercise of his loves, is the joy and 
essence of his life. Thought proceeds from love 
as surely as light from heat. We have no thoughts 
which are really our own, and which abide with us, 
except those which flow from, represent and corre- 
spond to 'our affections. We believe what we love 
and we love what we believe. To change a man's 
faith you must change his affections. His faith 
will follow his affections as surely as the shadow 
follows the moving object. We may change our 
wills, we may control our emotions, we may substi- 
tute a higher love and a nobler passion for a lower, 
or vice versd; but we cannot control our belief. 
We will involuntarily confirm whatever agrees with 
and corresponds to our emotional states; we will 
reject all else as false. 

What affections of the human mind cause the 
spiritual darkness which the heavenly light of 
the New Church finds it impossible at present to 
dissipate? 

Outside of the Christian sphere, there are two 
great classes who cannot see the truth of the heav- 
enly doctrines : 

First : Those who are immersed in sense or in 
states of external self-love. Men who are devoted 
to the acquisition of money, to the pursuit of glory 

23 M 



266 THE OTHER LIFE. 

or power, to the aggrandizement of themselves, to 
the displays of fashion and the pleasures of the 
senses, whose delight is in these things — all such 
are spiritually turned away from the Lord and 
heaven, and cannot see religious truth however 
clearly presented. If angels were to appear daily 
in the streets and preach to them, their ideas would 
go in at one ear and out at the other; for there 
are no heavenly aifections in their souls to seize 
upon divine truths and clasp them to the heart as 
the very pearls of wisdom for which they had been 
searching and sighing. 

Secondly : Those who are filled with the spirit 
of self-culture, which is only a more interior and 
subtile self-love. These believe in human develop- 
ment unaided by revelation, in nature and progress 
independent of Christ and his Word. They are 
the positivists, the rationalists, the communists, the 
spiritualists and others of the present day — a vast 
and increasing class. They may extricate them- 
selves from the bondage of a gross sensualism, but 
it is only to fall victims to the Beelzebub of spirit- 
ual pride and the self-conceit of scientific culture. 
These are blind to the heavenly doctrines of the 
New Church, which teach us the deep-seated evils 
of our natures, the utter finiteness of our powers, 



WHY ARE THESE THINGS NOT BELIEVED? 267 

and our absolute helplessness for good, except as 
we look believingly to the Divine Man — Jesus 
Christ. 

Surely these doctrines, so full of Christ and his 
Word, so beautiful, so tender, so true, so holy, will 
ere long find a recognition and a warm reception in 
many circles of the faithful and pious children of 
God. 

There are two great classes in the Christian 
church who reject the Lord at his second advent, 
and justify themselves with apparently strong rea- 
sons for doing so. 

One class is blinded by strong affection for the 
doctrines of their church, which they believe to 
be essential to the salvation of their souls ; — doc- 
trines which were imbibed in childhood, which 
have been implanted in their hearts and embalmed 
in their memories, and sanctified by the associations 
of the past and the hopes of the future. Men who 
love their doctrines with a spiritual ardor which 
would brave martyrdom for their sake, cannot pos- 
sibly see any truth in a system which controverts 
the fundamental positions of their cherished faith. 
Intensity of affection, however, proves nothing to 
be true ; for pagans and heretics and enthusiasts of 
all kinds have been just as earnest and just as 



268 THE OTHER LIFE. 

blind ; but it is a sufficient reason why the divine 
truth now revealed, is not received by those who in 
heart and life are nearest to its spirit. 

The second class in the Christian Church who 
are impenetrable to the rays of the new light, con- 
sist of those whose affections are more external; 
who love their Church as an outward organization, 
its ritual, its ministers, its people, its history, its 
learning, its influence and the whole sphere that 
emanates from it. This feeling is near akin to 
party feeling in politics, and to national feeling in 
different countries; a feeling that weakens if it 
does not destroy all genuine catholic and cosmo- 
politan sentiment. It has indeed a certain neces- 
sity and a certain use, as political parties and sepa- 
rate nationalities have; but its inordinate sway 
leads to bigotry and narrow-mindedness. People 
of this type are utterly averse to the consideration 
of any spiritual matters outside of their traditional 
sphere of thought and feeling. The bare suspicion 
that Swedenborg may be right, never crosses their 
minds. 

Each of these types is an enemy to the spiritual 
truths taught in the internal sense of the Word of 
God. Sometimes two of them or even all are 
combined in the same character. Imagine a man 



WHY ARE THESE THINGS NOT BELIEVED? 269 

whose soul is wedded to the dogmas of the old 
theology, who is thoroughly devoted to the ex- 
ternal things of some evangelical Church, who 
has a high degree of pride in his own spiritual 
knowledge and culture, and who has a keen eye to 
his own temporal interests. It is easier for a camel 
to go through the eye of a needle, than for such a 
man to comprehend or believe the truths of the 
New Age. 

Truths are received into the memory as food into 
the stomach. They will be found indigestible and 
unassimilable, and will be rejected, unless there is 
something in the emotional nature which has an 
affinity for them and draws them to itself and 
incorporates them with its own being. Truths can 
never be made a part of a man's faith and insinu- 
ated into his life, until they have become the objects 
of his affection. 

How is it possible, then, for the heavenly doc- 
trines of the New Church to be implanted in the 
affections of men ? 

There are three universal affections insinuated 
by the Lord in some degree into all men, the basis 
of our knowledge, the sources of our happiness, 
the badges of our spiritual life, distinguishing it 
from that of the brute. These affections are the 

23* 



270 THE OTHER LIFE. 

love of truth, the love of beauty and the love of 
goodness. 

All our advances in knowledge come necessarily 
from the love of knowing, of comparing, of ana- 
lyzing and of understanding. The delight in the 
acquisition of truth is a primal and necessary de- 
light in the human mind. The pursuit of truth is 
frequently prosecuted from selfish ends — the love 
of glory, the love of power or the love of wealth. 
The truths acquired^are also perverted or sectarian- 
ized so as to be accommodated to the state of the 
affections. But there is such a thing as a love of 
truth for the sake of the truth, without regard to 
its source or associations. 

This affection of knowing, comparing, analyzing, 
understanding and believing or disbelieving is not 
only fundamental but it is irrepressible. It will 
finally lead men to examine Swedenborg and his 
doctrines. They will not be contented with hear- 
say. They will not be influenced by prejudice. 
They will be animated by that purer, superior, 
abstract love of truth, which precedes and will 
finally dominate the inferior and concrete loves 
of sensual and external things, of traditions and 
dogmas and churches. Swedenborg will be studied 
as a phenomenon; explored as a new continent; 



WHY ARE THESE THINGS NOT BELIEVED? Ill 

analyzed as a new substance. The misrepresent- 
ations about him will be detected; the exaggera- 
tions discarded ; the rubbish cleared away; and the 
facts brought out into full view. 

It will then be discovered that the science of 
correspondences is the key to all other sciences, and 
that a spiritual sense pervades the Word of God, 
elevating the minds of men into somewhat of an- 
gelic light. It will be made so plain that none 
can question it. 

This clear-cut, geometrical demonstration of the 
truths of the New Church will be, however, only 
the first or preliminary proceeding. It cannot 
make any man believe them or love them until 
some affections of the soul are excited to sympa- 
thetic relations with them. 

What are these affections? In the first place, 
the love of the beautiful. Who does not know the 
sweet and pleasing sensations which are created in 
the perceptive faculties by the beauties of nature, 
by the sight of flower-gardens and green lawns, of 
the blue mountains in the distance, the far roll of 
the emerald sea, the golden sky of evening, and 
the boundless dome of night crowded with its 
celestial fires? There are similar sensations of 
delight in the contemplation of great truths. The 



272 THE OTHER LIFE. 

abstract truths of geometry impart a positive 
pleasure to many minds. Every science has its 
special delight comparable to the odor of flowers 
or the charms of music. And a great System of 
Truth, embracing all things, spirit and matter, 
God and nature; a system vast, sublime, coherent, 
harmonious, fills the soul with delight in propor- 
tion to the conception it forms of its grandeur and 
symmetry. This delight creates faith. 

" The harmony of a science/' says Lord Bacon, 
" where each part supports the other, is the true 
and short confutation of all the smaller objections." 

The rational faculty grasps truth ; the aesthetic 
faculty enjoys it ; but there is a higher faculty or 
power, seated in the heart or will, and that faculty 
uses it for the ends it was designed to accomplish ; 
and that use of the truth is attended by a spiritual 
delight, the joy of angels which passes all under- 
standing. 

The love of goodness is, in the last analysis, the 
love of use — the delight felt in adapting the wisest 
means to the best ends. This celestial love is given 
us by the Lord in proportion to our living faith in 
Him and our charity to the neighbor, or according 
as we have religiously kept the divine command- 
ments. This heavenly affection enables us to per- 



WHY ARE THESE THINGS NOT BELIEVED ? 273 

ceive, intuitively as it were, the causes and qualities 
of things better than the intellect can know them. 
He that has this divine love of use in his heart, 
recognizes the doctrinal truths of the New Church 
very clearly, for he perceives their power to regen- 
erate the individual soul, to renovate the church, 
to re-organize society on heavenly principles, and 
to restore, by means of the spiritual sense of the 
Word, the lost communication between angels and 
men. 

The three great affections, the love of truth, the 
love of beauty and the love of use, are at work in 
all men and at all times with different degrees of 
power. They are all at work in every individual 
mind which examines the heavenly doctrines ; and 
there is no man, however bigoted and sectarian, 
who will not be forced to cry out occasionally over 
the pages of Swedenborg, How rational ! how beau- 
tiful ! how pure and elevating ! 

Why cannot the sectarian see the doctrines of the 
New Church in all their truth and all their beauty 
and all their adaptability to the needs of the soul ? 
Because he loves his dogmas, his church, his min- 
ister, his people, better than he loves the pure 
truth, which he can never see until he is ready to 
sacrifice all these and everything else for it. Be- 

M* 



274 - THE OTHER LIFE. 

cause his aesthetic faculties are uncultivated or his 
ideas of beauty are narrow and conventional. Be- 
cause his love of use has too large an element of 
selfishness and worldliness in it, for that grand 
spiritual ideal of use which gives a spontaneous 
insight into truth. 

On this love of truth for its own sake and on the 
gradual emancipation of the human heart, by divine 
influences, from these inferior loves which prevent 
its discovery, the future progress of the world de- 
pends. These are the sturdy workmen who are 
clearing away the old and tough and unsightly 
weeds of error from the garden of the human soul, 
and who will plant in their stead the perennial 
flowers of beauty and love. 

The human race will outlive and outgrow all its 
imperfect states of evil and falsity, by a great, or- 
ganic and inevitable process. The divine fire from 
heaven which is kindling the Christian heart, will 
illumine the Christian mind to see the'divine truth. 
And he who surrenders all the theology and philos- 
ophy in the world for the spiritual sense of the 
Scriptures, revealed through Swedenborg, will not 
lose his life but find it. 

The doctrines of the New Church embody the 
highest truth, and are therefore capable of ravish- 



WHY ARE THESE THINGS NOT BELIEVED? 275 

ing the soul with the keenest sense of beauty and 
leading to the most thoroughly practical uses of 
life. There is a knowledge-loving faculty in man 
which must be gratified and which seeks to know 
truth for its own sake. There is an aesthetic sense 
which is delighted with harmony, symmetry and 
beauty in nature or in art, in philosophy as well as 
in poetry. There is a love of use, born of goodness 
in the soul, which recognizes the fitness and quali- 
ties of ideas as well as of things, and which seeks 
and finds them for the good they may do. These 
are the causes which are for ever silently at work, 
preparing mankind for the reception and acknow- 
ledgment of the doctrines of the New Church; 
which are therefore inevitable : 

" Inevitable as the life that starts 
From the deep bosom of the wintry snows, 
And bursts serenely on the blossoming air ; 
And shines through all the green and silver spring ; 
And makes the glimmer of that golden light 
With which the perfect Summer crowns her brow ." 



THE END. 



PUBLICATIONS OF J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

The Divine Attributes. Including also the Divine 

Trinity. A Treatise on the Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, and 
Correspondence. From the "Apocalypse Explained " of Emanuel 
Swedenborg. i2mo. Extra cloth, $2. 

Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and 
Wisdom. By Emanuel Swedenborg. From the original Latin 
as edited by Dr. J. F. I. Tafel. Translated by R. N. Foster. Demi 
8vo. Extra cloth, $2. 

Heaven and its Wonders, and Hell. From Things 

Heard and Seen. By Emanuel Swedenborg. From the Latin 
edition of Dr. J. F. I. Tafel. Translated by B. F. Barrett. Demi 
8vo. Extra cloth, $2.50. 

Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Pr^""'- 
dence. By Emanuel Swedenborg. From the original Lahu a» 
edited by Dr. J. F. I. Tafel. Translated by R. Norman Foster. 
Demi 8vo. Tinted paper. Extra cloth, $2.25. 

True Christian Religion. Containing the entire 

Theology of the New Church, foretold by the Lord in Dan vii. 13, 
14 and Rev. xxi. 1, 2. ■ By Emanuel Swedenborg. From the 
Latin edition of Dr. J. F. I. Tafel. Translated by R. Norman Foster. 
2 vols, demi 8vo. Tinted paper. Extra cloth, $5. 

Life and Works of Emanuel Swedenborg. By 

W. White. With Four Steel Plates. 8vo. Extra cloth, $5. 
Life of Emanuel Swedenborg, with a Synopsis of 

his Writings. By W. White. With an Introduction by Rev. B. 
F. Barrett. i2mo. Extra cloth, $1.50. 



Life : Its Nature, Varieties and Phenomena. 

By Leo H. Grindon, author of " Emblems," " Figurative Lan- 
guage," etc. First American Edition. i2rao. Extra cloth, $2.25. 



PUBLICATIONS OF J. B. LIPPINCOTT <5r» CO. 



Talks with a Child on the Beatitudes. By the 

author of "Talks with a Philosopher." i6mo. Fine cloth, 75 
cents. Cloth, flexible, 50 cents. 



" A volume written in a sweet, devout, 
simple and tender spirit, and calculated to 
edify the old as well as the young." — Bos- 
to?i Ev. Transcript. 



"A charming little volume to place in 
the hands of young people." — Boston 
Journal. 



Deus Homo : God-Man. By Theofhilus Parsons. 

Crown 8vo. Extra cloth, $2.50. 



" Perhaps no book has appeared from 
the scholars of the New Church that has 
promised more light to the inquirer or be- 



stowed more satisfaction upon the reader.' 
— Historical Magazine. 



Emanuel Swedenborg as a Philosopher and a Man 

of Science. By R. L. Tafel. Crown 8vo. Extra cloth, $2.25. 



" We invite our readers to peruse Prof. 
Tafel's book. Its reading will acquaint 
them with one of the greatest thinkers and 



one of the purest characters that ever 
lived." — St. Lojiis Paper. 



Elements of Character. By Mary G. Ware, 

author of "Death and Life," etc. i6mo. Cloth, $1.25. 



" This work is entitled to a place among 



the higher productions of American female 
li terature. ' ' — Harper's Magazine. 



Observations on the Growth of the Mind. By 

Sampson Reed. Seventh edition. i6mo. Extra cloth, $1. 



"The title of the work expresses its 
character. It is an attempt to show how 
the mind grows, and after defining the es- 
sential character of the mind the author 



points out, in a most interesting and orig- 
inal manner, the actual development re- 
quired." — Boston Transcript. 



Observations on the Authenticity of the Gospels. 

By a Layman. Second edition. i6mo. Extra cloth, $1. 



" A work that should be in everybody's 
library, and especially ought steps to be 
immediately taken to place it in the hands 



of every theological student in our land." 
— Religious Magazine. 

"The author writes with vigor and 
clearness." — North American Review. 



Sermons on the Lords Prayer. By Henry A. 

Worcester. i2mo. Cloth, $1.25. 



PUBLICATIONS OF J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

Mistaken; or, The Seeming and the Real. By 

Lydia Fuller. i2mo. Fine cloth, $1.50. 

Moody Mike; or, The Power of Love. A Chris t- 

mas Story. By Frank Sewall. Illustrated. i6mo. Extra 
cloth, $1. 

Talks with a Philosopher on the Ways of God to 

Man. By the author of " Talks with a Child on the Beatitudes." 
i6mo. Cloth. 

Lessons from Daily Life. By Emily E. Hildreth. 

1 2 mo. Tinted paper. Extra cloth, $1. 

The Other Life. By Dr. W. H. Holcombe, au- 

thor of " The Sexes," " In Both Worlds," etc. i2mo. Cloth. 

Who was Swedenborgf By 0. P. Hiller. i6mo. 

Paper cover, 25 cents. Cloth, 50 cents. 

Letters to a Man of the World. By J. F. E. 

Le Boys des Guays, ex-sous Prefect in Department du cher. Re- 
vised edition. i6mo. Cloth, $1.50. 

Doctrine of Life for the New yerusalem ; from 

the Commandments of the Decalogue. By Emanuel Sweden- 
BORG. 24mo. Extra cloth, gilt, 75 cents. 

Heroism. By Horace Field. i2mo. Extra cloth, 

#1.50. 

Thoughts in my Garden. By Mary G. Ware, 

author of " Elements of Character," etc. i6mo. Cloth, $1.25. 

Death and Life. By Mary G. Ware, author of 

" Thoughts in my Garden," etc. i6mo. Cloth, $1.25. 

Lectures on the New Dispensation signified by the 

New Jerusalem ; designed to unfold and elucidate the leading doc- 
trines of the New Church. By Rev. B. F. Barrett. i2mo. 
Cloth, $1.50. 

Letters on the Divine Trinity, addressed to Henry 

Ward Beecher. By Rev. B. F. Barrett. New and enlarged 
edition. i2mo. Extra doth, $1.25. 



PUBLICATIONS OF J. B. LIPPINCOTT <5r» CO. 



"A LIBRARY IN ITSELF." 



CHAMBERS'S ENCYCLOPEDIA. 

A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People. Illustrated with 
Numerous Wood Engravings. Complete in Ten Volumes Royal 
Octavo. Price per Volume, Cloth, $4.50; Sheep, $5 ; Half Turkey, 
$5.50. Accompanied by an Atlas of Forty Maps. Price, Cloth, 
$S ; Sheep, $5.50; Half Turkey, $6. 

The Publishers have the pleasure of announcing that they have issued 
the concluding PART OF CHAMBERS'S ENCYCLOPAEDIA, and 
that the work is now complete in 

TEN ROYAL OCTAVO VOLUMES, of over 800 pages each, il- 
lustrated with about 4000 engravings, and accompanied by 

AN ATLAS OF FORTY MAPS ; the whole, it is believed, form- 
ing the most complete work of reference extant. 

The design of this work, as explained in the Notice prefixed to the 
first volume, is that of a Dictioitary of Universal Knowledge for the 
People — not a mere collection of elaborate treatises in alphabetical 
order, but a work to be readily consulted as a Dictionary on every sub- 
ject on which people generally require some distinct information. Com- 
menced in 1859, the work was brought to a close in 1868, and the 
Editors confidently point to the Ten volumes of which it is composed 
as forming the most Comprehensive — as it certainly is the Cheapest — En- 
cyclopedia ever issued in the English language. 

TO TEACHERS, who are frequently called upon to give succinct 
explanations of topics in the various branches of education, often 
beyond the mere outline of information contained in the text-books, no 
other work will be found so useful ; while the conciseness of the several 
articles has made it practicable to bring the whole work within the 
compass of a few volumes, and to afford it at a small cost compared to 
others of its class. 

FOR THE GENERAL READER. — " Upon its literary merits," 
says Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie, "its completeness and accuracy, 
and the extent and variety of its information, there can be only one 
opinion. The work is worthy of the high aim and established reputa- 
tion of its projectors. Art and science, theology and jurisprudence, 
natural history and metaphysics, topography and geography, medicine 
and antiquities, biography and belles-lettres, are all discussed here, not 
in long treatises, but to an extent sufficient to give requisite information 
at a glance, as it were. Sometimes, when the subject justifies it, more 
minute details are given. ... Its fullness upon American subjects 
ought to recommend it especially in this country, and its low price 
makes it one of the cheapest and most accessible works ever published." 



Copies of the work will be sent to any address in the United States, free of charge 
on receipt of the price by the Publishers, Liberal Terms to Ao-Ptits. 



